Facebook’s Apps Went Down. The World Saw How Much It Runs on Them.

For more than five hours on Monday, the world got a taste of life without Facebook and its apps.

People in many places discovered that Facebook and its apps had burrowed their way into nearly every facet of existence.

In Mexico, politicians were cut off from their constituents. In Turkey, shopkeepers couldn’t sell their wares. And in Colombia, a nonprofit organization that uses WhatsApp to connect victims of gender-based violence to lifesaving services found its work impaired.

“Because we have a field team, we were able to mitigate some of the more serious risks today’s outage presented,” said Alex Berryhill, the director of digital operations for the group, Cosas de Mujeres. “But that might not have been the case for hundreds of other hotlines around the world. Today was a big reminder: Technologies are tools, not solutions.”

The Facebook outage on Monday was a planetary-scale demonstration of how essential the company’s services have become to daily life. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger have long been more than handy tools for chatting and sharing photos. They are critical platforms for doing business, arranging medical care, conducting virtual classes, carrying out political campaigns, responding to emergencies and much, much more.

The unease about a single corporation mediating so much human activity motivates much of the scrutiny surrounding Facebook.