Areas most affected by Facebook outage revealed

Islington most affected area in the UK by Facebook outage

• North London borough most affected by Facebook outage
• Social media usage across the UK was analysed to discover the areas that were most affected by Facebook outage

New study has revealed Islington was the most affected area during the just ended Facebook outage.  

A new study has revealed that Islington is the UK’s most affected area by Facebook outage, with its residents spending the longest amount of social media time online per capita.

The study by cybersecurity and privacy experts VPNOverview.com analysed ONS data across more than 400 areas of the UK to discover the country’s most affected area.

The research looked at the social media usage among different age groups compared to the demographic make-up of each unitary authority, district, and borough in the UK.

Islington ranked top of the list with residents spending an average of one hour 45 minutes on social media each day. This is driven by the fact that the borough has one of the highest proportions of women under 35 in any area of the UK.

Women aged 16 to 24 spend the longest amount of time on social media each day, estimated at an average of 192 minutes – three hours and 37 minutes – while women between 25 and 34 years old spend around two hours and 42 minutes on social each day.

In Islington, 16% of women are between 16 and 24 – considerably higher than the UK average of 10%, while 27% are between 25 and 34, which is more than double the national average of 13%.

As a result, the North London borough, which has a population of 248,115, is estimated to spend a combined total of 434,136 hours on social sites and apps each day.

Tower Hamlets is the UK’s second biggest user of social media per person in the UK, with an estimated average of one hour and 42 minutes online per person each day.

In third place was Lambeth, recording daily usage average of one hour 40 minutes per person among the London borough’s population of 321,813.

A spokesperson for VPNOverview.com said: “Even if this incident is not caused by malicious actors, the impact of a single outage makes it painfully apparent how vulnerable our digital infrastructure and digital society have become. The collective damage incurred by people from not having access to their usual communication and information channels is probably immense, yet intangible. We need to start rethinking our dependence on digital networks and how to act if they fail us. What happens if several major airports in Europe lose control of all their communication channels suddenly and for a prolonged period? Don’t for a minute assume cybercriminals and rogue states have not tried infiltrating similar infrastructures. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp have become too important and too big to fail, and yet they fail. They have some of the best programmers, network specialists and security experts in the world, and yet they are vulnerable. It is time to rethink how to protect key digital infrastructures in the digital era.

Building redundancies (even for unfathomable scenarios) into any backup plan is extremely important these days.”