Facebook outage gave a boost to Russian social networks
During Monday’s worldwide Facebook outage, Russian social networks saw an increase in activity, which Moscow authorities said demonstrated that Russia was correct to create its own sovereign internet platforms and social networks.
For years, the Russian government has wanted more sovereignty over its internet sector, placing pressure on international IT corporations to remove material and keep data in Russia. Its capacity to ban platforms that violate its regulations has also increased.
During the almost six-hour interruption of Facebook services on Monday evening, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova stated that it “answers the question of whether we need our own social networks and internet platforms.”
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The outage was blamed by Facebook, which prevented its 3.5 billion users from accessing services such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, on an error in configuration setup change.
Vkontakte, Russia’s largest home-grown social network, has significantly more daily users in the nation than Facebook and claimed an increase in messages and users after Facebook’s services were temporarily discontinued.
“The number of Vkontakte video views increased by 18% and the number of messages sent in messenger by 21%,” the social network’s chief, Marina Krasnova, was quoted as saying by the Izvestia daily.
Mainstream social media outage has clearly given a boost to other social networks.
