Yesterday ten minutes of panic, at least in Italy, because in the rest of the world they lasted much longer. What happened? The META servers, and therefore Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, had a malfunction. It happens rarely, but we’re not used to it. For me, with every message sent, a clock icon appeared, and the first thing you think is that it’s your fault, so you close and reopen the app, turn on and restart the smartphone, and nothing. Phone calls to friends follow: “Does WhatsApp work for you?”. “Not to me.” “Not even me.” «I’ll write to you on Telegram». «Okay».
So go and search on Google, nothing, and then on . Soon when? Won’t you tell us a time?
In the meantime, those who were agonizing because they couldn’t upload a photo (from influencers to users who had to upload a photo of their kitten or a photo of what they were about to eat for dinner), those who imagined a world without social media, without WhatsApp, those who folded on Telegram. This is to say how much we depend on the internet and technology, and I don’t use dependence in a negative sense, they are our modern prostheses (Elon Musk also wants to put AI in the human brain, I’m applying as a guinea pig, so what do I have to lose now? ?) without it we cannot live, we feel cut off from the world, out of everything. (A good service that takes our data, everyone does it, but on the other hand it’s free, and when Zuckerberg proposed to put WhatsApp at one euro a year there was almost a worldwide insurrection, how spoiled are we when up to twenty years ago we paid one euro for each SMS).
And to think that the biggest risk, which will happen sooner or later, does not come from hackers, but from the Sun, from solar flares, from geomagnetic storms. The last one, in 2003, which became known as the Halloween storm, knocked out many electronic devices, including GPS satellites. Sooner or later it will happen again, it’s just a matter of time, and it could be much worse, like the Carrington Event, when in 1859 the most powerful solar storm ever recorded occurred.
At the time it caused damage to the telegraphs, not much, but today it would be a catastrophe, the real apocalypse would be no longer being able to access the internet, not being able to chat, (and not being able to post a photo of your kitten, oh well, that’s not a disaster) . In short, dear Musk, dear Zuckerberg, dear NASA, shield everything well, satellites, networks, mobile phones, we are also willing to shield ourselves, but watch out for the Sun, without internet services we would be toast.