Facebook Service Disruption Analysis
[ Reading time: 3 minutes] In this article, I present a brief analysis of global internet disruption from the perspective of Facebook social media services. FB publishes its service interruption data by country, date, and duration under its data transparency initiative which shines a light on controls exercised by various nations on local internet access.
Internet Disruption
Internet disruptions are usually local government-imposed restrictions that prevent people from using the internet to conduct digital communication. Facebook services are considered as a digital communication instrument and as such is not immune to such disruptions.
Data Exploration
Data was obtained from FB in CSV format and was explored to identify patterns, connections, and relationships between FB service interruption with local and global events. Data contained 46 countries that experienced FB service interruptions between the years 2016-2019.
What about the rest of the world's 195 + countries? The first inference that could be made on the lack of data was that FB does not share all nations service disruption data.
46 Countries access to FB was throttled between 2017-2019
Based on initial data exploration, I observed a total of 46 countries FB service interrupted for various time duration. These are:
Brazil, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mauritania, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Chad, Ukraine, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Iraq, Benin, Montenegro, Somalia, Myanmar, Algeria, Mali, Uzbekistan, Iran, Equatorial Guinea, Russia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Venezuela, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Tajikistan, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Cameroon, Armenia, South Sudan, India, Gabon, The Gambia, Egypt, Togo, Liberia, Swaziland, Libya, Syria, Vietnam, and Sudan.
8 of these nations are Middle East nations and 14 are considered underdeveloped nations per UN.
Frequency of Disruption
FB data contains the duration of service interruption. Over 38+ countries suffered FB service interruption at least once from 2016 through 2019. Data plot shows one country reporting 200 interruptions while the rest suffered less than 25 interruptions over the three years.
Disruption Analysis by Country
While exploring data by Country, India stood out as a nation with the highest number of interruptions to FB services.
Country Analysis Excluding India
Excluding outlier India with 200 FB access interruptions, other nations that throttled internet and access to FB are Iraq, Algeria, Ethiopia, Syria, and Turkey.
Duration of Interruption
Some countries like Iraq, Indonesia, and Iran experienced only 1 disruption however, they differ significantly in terms of duration.
2H2017 interruption duration shows India and Cameroon throttled access to FB services over extended periods.
1H 2019 interruptions are concentrated and clustered in North India (light blue bands). Myanmar ( a.k.a Burma) imposed extended internet access disruption (yellow bands).
2H2019 internet interruption again shows India throttling internet access to FB services in its Northern states (Kashmir) besides Iraq.
1H-2018 disruption analysis, it is India again throttling access to FB continuing interruption of the internet in Northern states of India.
2H 2018 interruption duration once again shows India as the only country carrying out widespread throttling of access to FB services over extended periods.
Additional Co-relations
Although Facebook does not co-relate its service interruption data with other data, I attempted to co-relate service disruption data with other data and have some interesting observations to share.
Facebook Service Interruption and Crime Co-relation.
I performed regression using Microsoft Excel and find that out of the top 10 countries with most internet disruptions, Pakistan has the strongest and most significant correlation between crime index and the frequency of internet disruptions. i.e. more FB service interruption correlates with more crime.
Correlation of 0.72: As crime increases, the number of internet disruptions tends to increase. 0.72 is a strong, positive correlation. In statistics, the correlation coefficient, denoted by r, is a value between -1 and 1. -1 indicates a perfect negative linear relationship, and 1 indicates a perfect positive relationship.
Significance (P-Value) of 0.06: There is a 6% chance that we obtain results as extreme as the data observed in this test if we were to perform another test. This data is much more significant than the findings from the nine other countries (the cut off is normally 0.05 or 0.10, depending on our confidence level).
For the other nine countries, we cannot conclude a correlation between crime index and the frequency of internet disruptions.
Key Insights
Based on quantitative data exploration and the given data spanning 2016-2019 FB service disruption, India is the world's top nation that routinely throttles internet access of its people for extended periods. This phenomenon is concentrated in the Northern part of India around Kashmir and neighboring localities. Other than India, data shows Burma, Ethiopia, Iraq and Algeria throttling access to FB services.
Secondary research of the interruptions coincides with adverse events that took place in the local geos. Local authorities have cited reasons such as the necessity to "keep the peace", "maintain stability" or "law and order" as reasons for cutting off access to FB. Authorities also cite cyber-attacks, leakage of school exams, and in response to high profile assassinations as reasons that compelled certain nations to disrupt access to Facebook services. The most interesting reason to disrupt access to FB comes from Iraq - to limit the impact on national productivity during work hours.
FB service disruption correlated with more crime in Pakistan. This is an interesting finding worth exploring deeper for cause and effect.
Access to the internet is considered a basic human right under Article 19 of UN resolution. It is not just the people in 46 nations who are unable to access FB at all times but even advanced nations such as the United States report more than 19 million people without any access to any internet, let alone FB, as reported by FCC [2].
Years 2016-2019,there have been 370 documented internet shutdowns worldwide.[3]
Research Questions
Good research begins with good research questions. What questions can practitioners elicit from the data and this analysis for feedback into Research.
RQ1: What can be predicted from the data given the finding that FB interruption correlates with local disturbance ?
RQ2: What does lack of FB service disruption data indicate ?
RQ3: The duration of disruption is an interesting feature discovered in this analysis. How/where can historical knowledge of disruption duration in hours/days be used ?
Real World Applications
Facebooks service interruption data may be used by businesses, employers, local governments as an indicator of risk.
References
[1] https://transparency.facebook.com/internet-disruptions
[3] https://www.accessnow.org/keepiton/