If you’ve been having trouble getting onto Facebook lately, you’re not alone. Since the start of the year, Facebook has already experienced 33 outages, including two of the biggest ones since 2022. While it’s easy to imagine that Facebook could be under siege by malicious hackers, the truth might actually be worse for the company. Tech experts say that Facebook may have created a system that’s now too complex to keep running, particularly as the company continues to cut staff. One expert has warned that the problems are only going to get worse. The company’s biggest issue is something called “technical debt.” This essentially refers to the fact that big tech companies like Facebook have built very complex pieces of the Internet on the back of old-fashioned systems that don’t quite work. There are a myriad of “legacy systems” that people just don’t have the time to fix. As Facebook has grown and swallowed up services like Instagram and Whatsapp, it has had to make more things work on the back of this technical debt. If anything goes wrong in one service, the consequences can quickly spread to lots of different services. This means that issues with routine updates and new features can trigger cascading effects that lead to outages big enough for users to notice. Cybersecurity expert James Bore put it succinctly: “It’s going to keep on growing out of control and keep on decaying and becoming more fragile with more failures…….people will lose faith and, eventually, I suspect it will just vanish.”
