Just for fun 
I don’t see the value of that comparison:
Can people not have surgery, use their bank account, fly, or call emergency services if Meta is down?
All this stuff is purely about money. For you, as an affected user, it is more important that you had scheduled surgery or flight or you can’t use your money/bank account, etc than you can’t read some BS on FB. But for corps, including the ones affected by the issue is more important that they lose money because of delayed flights, ads that are not shown on FB and Instagram, that they can’t take a percentage from the operation with your bank account, etc. So in a way, this comparison is quite valid
Handy summary from Hackernoon.
Statistics are subjective.
To you, these stats may not be relevant or related but to others, they may well be. And for the most part, can be interpreted in any way you choose.
While the Meta outage didn’t directly compromise critical public infrastructure or safety systems, it did cause widespread inconvenience and economic impact and highlighted the extent to which modern society relies on digital platforms.
Seeing such figures helps us recognise the fragility of modern computing, and with such detail, we can (hopefully) be more rigorous with how we plan software releases to ensure minimal impact on the end users.
And from the other side of the coin, hackers could research what caused such massive outages and target specific parts of other systems. I don’t personally know what caused the Meta outage and haven’t had time to read up on it. But imagine that the root cause was a weakness that also existed in other systems… say emergency services communication systems, or hospital systems … what happens if a hacker used the same weakness to attack those services and cause similar size outages and disruption?
Could the government use these stats to say “Actually, we have the same vulnerability Meta had… and this is a huge risk for us, we need to fix this NOW!”
(Think back to when the NHS got hit with ransomware because they were still running outdated systems that were vulnerable…)
Comparisons like this certainly have value, if to serve as nothing more than a warning of what could happen.
@cassandrahl wrote about it
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In my opinion, this incident highlights a significant lapse in security testing protocols. It underscores the critical need for rigorous and continuous testing in the tech industry to prevent such widespread disruptions.
The cause and changes:
And throwing a billion to buy a company that should be doing the updates/patching better:
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