I wonder if airdrops aren’t still a problem for some networks and connectivity companies. Is this any different from 2014? The report of Gmail, Google Drive and other services being inaccessible to Europeans was originally because of an information on the website being down, but later the blog post mentioned that it had been access blocked by European ISPs despite the fact that there were no updates and websites were up. I wonder if those countries’ figures may mirror the ones in Canada – September 2016 saw 1,800 complaints brought against Rogers Communications and their large clients like Gmail.
What Services Are Affected by the Outage?
Two backbone providers, Level 3 and CenturyLink have reported a global fiber cut that has affected the Gmail and Facebook website. Officials have begun to work on the issue to fix this so that people can access these sites again. “Yahoo believes that there is an issue impacting certain users who receive email through Yahoo for iOS devices, and have tried various troubleshooting steps including restoring from an iPhone backup, but these steps have been unsuccessful. For consumers, if you do not normally receive email from Yahoo and you have received emails from these unintended recipients and have restored your device in the last 24 to 48 hours, we recommend changing your settings to make the sender unreachable.”
How Did the Outage Happen?
On March 20th, several European services were inaccessible including Gmail and Facebook. Logging into the accounts was impossible and customers had to switch automatically to a slower service package. Some speculated that the outage may have been caused by an error in its connection with Google. The statement that Google had noticed the partial outage and was working to restore full service late in the afternoon on March 20th does not seem to be true (see A False Conclusion). Meanwhile, Oracle has issued a statement claiming that it felt pleased with its performance: “We’ve always said that we believe we did everything right. We are pleased with this resolution and expect our future agreements with others would take into account the lessons learned from this incident.”
What Impact Will the Outage Have on Users?
On Wednesday, July 26th, 2016, the biggest internet outage in history occurred. On this day Mail, Gmail and Facebook became inaccessible for 31 minutes in North America and 15 minutes in Europe. The outage was due to a packet loss incident on a vendor’s network overseas. This left North America, China, Egypt and many other countries that were affected. Technology experts are divided with those who believe there will be minimal impact and others who predict the damage will be significant . Our services are provided by a third party provider. Should the system go down due to technical issues, please contact our office to obtain a service agreement that details steps you should take should we have an outage. It is recommended that you forward all important files to your personal email address and setup auto sync on your phone or computer.
Solutions to Possible Problems
Due to tensions between European Union legislation and US policies, many companies such as Google and Facebook may not be able to operate in countries like France. There are four ways companies can avoid this situation: ‘Bypass of the issue, risk mitigation, pre-emptive blocking of content, or collective agreement.’ For example, Google already uses an intermediate layer of content filtering which prevents certain applications such as Netflix and Twitter from working in certain regions. This can be applied to more than websites, more granularly living within a state. A BitTorrent community dubbed the Power To Internet (PT-I) is trying to build a transitional solution called “cellphones-as-a-computer” that connect near field communication devices to WiFi, buy it directly via application selling points in their cities, mainly at a
Conclusion
After the introduction of GDPR, many American companies began to struggle because European countries implemented to block or deny access for their citizens.
With Facebook and Gmail urging European readership, officials denied or blocked those services citing violation of GDPR.
The inconsistent policy created a ripple effect across the world with other US companies being limited in international engagement as well.
Facebook’s lack of cooperation caused serious uproar among digital rights’ activists who have been charged under several EU protocols. The new problem was also reported in 2015 when the U.S. blocked WhatsApp from offering its services within the realm of European countries becasue it didn’t fully honour EU law.Though Facebook’s refusal to comply put thousands of organisations and individuals at crucial risk, it has taken actions to address this issue and make certain GDPR doesn’t cause any such catastrophic consequences for users.One step that Facebook took is expanding AcroForms GDPR consent to all apps as well.