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We’re aware that some people are having trouble uploading or sending images, videos and other files on our apps. We're sorry for the trouble and are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible. #facebookdown — Facebook (@facebook) July 3, 2019

Facebook, Instagram, and other affiliated systems have gone down, highlighting the necessity for decentralized infrastructure behind platforms.

Beginning early Wednesday, the popular social media platform Facebook experienced service outages affecting many regions across the globe, causing spotty service to users seeking to access content, particularly with images. This outage affected several different platforms associated with Facebook, including Instagram and encrypted messaging app WhatsApp, disrupting the communications of millions of users worldwide. Facebook posted about these issues on Twitter, which was still usable at time of writing.

Notably, this comes at a time when Facebook is developing its own digital currency, Libra, to serve as a global payments system directly integrated into its platform, as well as for users around the world.

Facebook goes down AGAIN but yet they want to host a '#cryptocurrency network' for everyday payments.$DASH never goes down, isn't controlled by power hungry monsters, and has #chainlocks and #InstantSend — ₿allou (@MrBallou) July 3, 2019

The Dash Platform promises a stable decentralized application layer

The drawbacks of platforms built around centralized companies and infrastructure have created a key opportunity for decentralized systems for building applications. The upcoming Dash Platform, set for release with Dash version 1.0 codenamed Evolution, aims to create just such an opportunity. The Dash Platform will create a method for building decentralized applications on top of the Dash blockchain, leveraging the DAPI (decentralized API) and Dash Drive, a distributed storage system, to store data used by applications, which is referenced on the Dash blockchain.

This may provide an efficient means for creating new social networks and communication tools which are not vulnerable to the drawbacks of centralization, namely single point of network failure and censorship of content, built on a next-generation financial network which would allow for seamless integration of payments and monetization into these platforms. Additionally, the Dash network is well-suited for mass scaling, and is built with an incentivized network of nodes called masternodes, providing an infrastructure that is both robust and fully-decentralized upon which apps with large global user bases may be built.

These kinds of tweets set unrealistic expectations on the user experience of Bitcoin. In the practical sense of "can you actually get a transaction through," Bitcoin is down quite, quite often. https://t.co/5uXG4Ynrvx — Joel Valenzuela (@TheDesertLynx) July 2, 2019

Bitcoin’s network stays up, but practical usability suffers during congestion

During times of outages, contrasts are often drawn with decentralized networks, such as Dash and Bitcoin, which remain operational constantly due to their lack of a single point of failure. However, due to network limitations, Bitcoin transactions are often delayed and unworkable for regular payments. At time of writing, over 10,000 transactions are waiting in the mempool backlog, with levels higher than 30,000 this week, while both average and median transaction fees remain in the several-dollar range, making transactions both costly and time-consuming to complete. Dash, meanwhile, has demonstrated transaction volumes several times higher than Bitcoin’s, has median fees in the fraction of a cent range, and recently implemented ChainLocks, securely confirming transactions instantly, removing the need to wait for settlement.