IT-CRUISERS: Everything IT

The World's most popular Social Media platforms - Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger went down for over 6 hours on October 4th 2021. These super Social Media platforms are owned by one company - Facebook and run on same infrastructure. Reports has it that this 6 hour long outage saw $7 billion wiped from Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth as users flocked to alternative platforms. Image Source: https://see.news/users-report-issues-with-facebook-instagram-whats-app/ I observed the downtime here in Nigeria from around 16:55 GMT+1 when I could neither send or receive messages on WhatApp. Also I observed my Facebook news feed was not getting refreshed with new content. At first I thought the problem was with my mobile telecom data service, but realized I could access other websites on the internet. On making further checks online I saw a report from an online real-time outage monitoring website DownDetector that Facebook was down! There were numerous reports as well that th...

In one of my previous blog posts INTERNET PENETRATION - Nigeria Top Three in Global Online Search , a research conducted by Google ranked Nigeria among the top three countries of the world that spend quality time online in search of various goods and service. The latest development is Google has announced Nigeria to be the first on the African continent to receive Google's free public Wi-Fi service via the Google Station initiative - a program to provide high quality, high-speed Wi-Fi hotspots in Nigeria. Google Station initiative is already live in five countries globally and will connect millions of users via 200 Wi-Fi hotspots spread across five cities in Nigeria within one year. The Internet connectivity will ride on a partner Fiber Optic infrastructure to provide Wi-Fi hotspots at public places such as colleges, shopping malls, markets and bus stations in over 200 locations in five cities across Nigeria by the end of 2019.

Over the years Internet penetration has greatly improved across the developing countries of the world especially Nigeria which now has over 92 million internet users. Finding information online has become a common practice as people comfortably search for information using web search engines, especially Google  and get relevant search results that answers their questions and further provides them insight to related articles, events, photos, news and even map locations. Thanks to Google Map Local Guides like myself who diligently contribute to improve the map by sharing knowledge of the local environment. The mobile internet revolution has made it possible for people even in the rural areas to have access to internet on their mobile devices. During my University days, precisely in the year 2008, I carried out a questionnaire research on the topic: "How Effectively Do You Utilize Your Mobile Phones For Internet Access", the responses were amazing as people were alrea...