Opinion: The fragile Internet is a threat to the economy

After Facebook’s outage, the engineering director at security software firm Cloudflare Inc called it a reminder about the fragile nature of internet, where millions of interconnected systems are dependent on each other to make it work. — AFP

It has been a rough few months for the Internet.

In June, Fastly Inc’s content delivery network failure forced some of the world’s biggest e-Commerce and media websites offline. Later, there were massive data breaches at T-Mobile US Inc and Amazon.com Inc’s Twitch streaming service. And last week, Facebook Inc’s main social network, Instagram and WhatsApp were down for about six hours. Then on Friday, it happened again — albeit more briefly.