THE OCTOBER 4TH, 2021 META’s TRIUMVIRATE SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM OUTAGE: AN APPRAISAL OF THE IMPLICATIONS FOR DEPENDENT USERS

Abstract

The uses of social media have developed into a universal and virtually inevitable phenomenon that has transformed the method by which students communicate, interrelate, mingle and socialize, and have become an integral portion of students’ social and cultural lifestyle. Subsequently, students use a considerable measure of their time on social media. University students and adolescence are viewed as the prevalent users of this contemporary technology. Notwithstanding the mounting quantity of literature on the uses of social media around the globe, there is a drought of investigation on how the uses of social media affect students’ social life and impact of outages of these platforms. This evocative, investigative study scrutinized, internet accessibility among undergraduates in Anambra State, who among these students have access to Meta’s Social Media platforms, these students’ dependence on Social Media platforms for various uses and the consequences of the October 4th Meta's Triumvirate social media platform outage. A sample of 398 students was drawn using multi-stage sampling technique from a study population drawn from three randomly selected Universities in Anambra state. A well-structured questionnaire was administered to the students to gather their responses. This was analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 16.0. The findings of the study showed that the most frequently used social media platform was Facebook. That undergraduate students in Anambra have extreme access to the internet. Also it was gathered that undergraduates had knowledge of Meta’s triumvirate social platforms and utilizes them for various purposes. It was further revealed that the October 4^th 2021 outage impacted the students’ ability to use social media and prompted them to reflect on their dependency on social media. The study equally revealed that the majority of the sampled students testified to be active on META’s platforms when the outage occurred. Also, the respondents identified that they knew that their academic performance endured on account of their social media life and also that it stressed them. Despite the students understanding of these facts, the study found that students flunked to reduce the time spent on social media and used social media more for business than for academic purposes. Consequently, fruitful uses of social media for academic purposes were prescribed so as to reduce the adverse effect of the uses of social media.