Th social media app WhatsApp has gone down this morning and we have comments from cyber security experts on the matter below.
Th social media app WhatsApp has gone down this morning and we have comments from cyber security experts on the matter below.
Information Security Buzz (aka ISBuzz News) is an independent resource that provides the experts comments, analysis and opinion on the latest Information Security news and topics
The ongoing outage of WhatsApp highlights that global outages are one of the major downsides of a centralised system.“Centralised apps mean that all the eggs are in one basket. When that basket breaks, all the eggs get smashed.”
Decentralised systems are far more reliable. There’s no single point of failure so they can withstand significant disruption and still keep people and businesses communicating.
It’s one of the reasons why we’re seeing an increase in enterprises using Element and the decentralised Matrix network, particularly for mission-critical operations.
Whether it be malicious or otherwise, this highlights the significance of vast hosting companies directing data around the internet along with companies and individuals relying on single points of communication. It would be difficult to point the finger at an attack at this early development stage, but it cannot be ruled out due to the impact a potential attack could have. Suppliers which bottleneck data for billions of devices and networks are an obvious target and should they ever be hit with the perfect attack and last for days it could be catastrophic. Multiple areas will inevitably be significantly impacted as a result of this downtime, along with an predicted financial hit but lessons from other recent prominent times when the internet has gone down will have hopefully taught many to have access to other forms of communication.