Facebook outage shows need for more rivals: EU antitrust chief

Facebook’s six-hour outage the previous day shows the repercussions in relying on just a few big players and underscores the need for more rivals, EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said on Tuesday.

The outage prevented the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, the largest ever tracked by web monitoring group Downdetector.

Droves of users switched to competing apps such as Twitter and TikTok on Monday. Several Facebook employees who declined to be named told Reuters that they believed that the outage was caused by an internal mistake in how internet traffic is routed to its systems.