The seven-hour outage on Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram yesterday has sparked discussion in the country over assurance of connectivity to the social media platforms and with it, the need for alternative functions to service audiences.

This is coming in view of the fact that the global outage this time around lasted longer than the one experienced in 2019 which only lasted for an hour.

Some popular sites such as Telegram and Twitter were the ones operating.

The outage, according to ICT expert Chiku Chitsundi Banda has exposed gaps in the ICT sector and should thus be a lesson on why Malawi should invest in the ICT sector.

Chitsundi-Banda suggests the possible launch of social media sites not attached to Facebook.

While acknowledging the socio-economic impact outages have on society, President for the ICT Association of Malawi, Bram Fudzulani, fears scaling up new platforms would be a challenge for Malawi where internet uptake is already thought to be expensive.

There has not yet been an official explanation as to what caused the global outage although Facebook has only described it as a technical fault.