When Facebook went dark

An hours-long outage has exposed the extent of Facebook’s reach – raising questions over whether it should be broken up.

For six hours on October 4, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, all owned by the same parent company, were inaccessible to the 3.5 billion people who use them.

The outage exposed just how extensive Facebook’s communications empire is, and left people wondering if it is a monopoly that needs to be broken up.