LIKE the true millennial I am, how could I pass up the opportunity to talk about last week’s hiccup with Instagram, Facebook and to a lesser extent, Whatsapp.

I began writing this week’s column a few minutes after this ‘blackout’ had left- you know, right when everybody could’ve started posting on Instagram again. Not distracting at all- really smart on my part.

But during the six-plus hours of IG-free time, I did the most logical thing someone in my young bracket would do: I was glued to Google and Twitter (the usual when Instagram and Facebook goes down), to the point of refreshing the pages every five minutes to see if my beloved Instagram was returned to me as yet.

Obsessive? Perhaps, but this did allow for something to be put into perspective. The first was an understanding of the actual issue through the live and multifaceted reports being made by the Independent, and the second was the social media meltdown that resulted from the seeming collapse of this superficial social world.

I personally have not found anything that gives a concrete reason for the blackout, but the Independent drew attention to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack which occurred in 2016 and affected Reddit, Spotify, and Twitter.

Through this, large parts of the internet’s infrastructure can be broken by overloading it with internet traffic. And since many of the world’s largest internet companies rely on the same underlying infrastructure, according to the news outlet, a single point of failure can instantly cause issues across much of the web.

The internet seems like both an incredibly simple and incredibly complex for users. It isn’t necessarily seen but has far-reaching impacts- which brings me to the more interesting side of things.

In a span just five minutes, the #instagramdown had moved from having 95.6K tweets to 101K. What that means is that in just five minutes- 300 seconds- about 5.4K tweets were made from persons across the world.

The interesting thing is that Twitter allows you to see these tweets (if you’re patient enough to go through them). But a quick scan would know you that there were all premised on few things like the frustration that the apps were down, anticipation for their return and a sense of confusion as to what to do in this largely social media free setting.

For me, what this spotlighted was how important social media has become in our daily lives.

I personally cannot imagine a day without scrolling through my Instagram feed or messaging someone on Whatsapp. And this dependency syndrome is what Caribbean Journalist and Transparency Activist, Afra Raymond underscored in a lecture with journalists last year. According to him, there is a massive dependence globally on ‘FANG’- Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. Effectively, they have become so integrated into our daily life, to the point of almost being unable to live without them and to the point where they can be avenues to effect massive changes, like garnering support or drawing attention to issues (or allegedly interfering in elections – #russia).

Now on Wednesday, the Facebook applications (Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp) were not functioning as well as they have always been and there was massive hysteria of the seemingly dystopian setting of not being able to use social media. It was like we could not decide what to do with the time we would normally spend on social media.

According to statistics provided by the Digital Statistics World, the average user spends about two hours, 22 minutes (or 142 minutes) on social media daily. Those simple 10-minute scrolls through Instagram or just ‘gyaffing’ on Whatsapp really add up.

Now to add further context, it must be noted that data has replaced oil as the world’s most important resource, as stated in the Economist (2018).

With digital services becoming ever increasing and geography becoming a much smaller hindrance to communication because of the myriad of online services accessible, it comes as no surprise that data would top the list. And Facebook and its family of apps could quite possibly be one the largest holders of data in the world, so really it isn’t hard to believe the DDoS attack might have caused/ contributed to the blackout.

So now what comes to mind is whether we are really conscious of how much time we spend online in these spaces and do we think that this time is productively spent? Perhaps more importantly, do we understand just how dependent we have become on social media? And how does this affect the way we live our lives? I think now would be a good time to reexamine how much time I spend on the ‘gram’- well, maybe in another 142 minutes or so.