For millions, the WhatsApp outage could have been a matter of life and death | Humza Jilani

Social media is a lifeline in many countries, and Facebook must do more to protect its systems from routine failures

Regulators in the US, UK and the EU are gearing up to probe Facebook over anticompetitive practices, its impact on the mental health of children and its destabilising impact on democracies.

As these investigations begin, we should think of the 4 October global outage as a warning of the dangers that come with piling the lifelines and livelihoods of millions of vulnerable people into a single behemoth.

Humza Jilani led Project Lifeline's medico-legal asylum project in Matamoros, Mexico, in 2019. His reporting has previously appeared in Foreign Policy. A Marshall scholar, he is an MPhil student in international relations at Oxford