Is Facebook Vulnerable To Terrorism?

Today 7th March 2012 at around 7 am GMT Facebook (FB) was down for about 30 minutes or more. I have no idea why. There are only a few possibilities: maintenance, accident, sabotage, terrorism.

The first reason will nearly always be the reason. But what if it was the last reason: terrorism? Sounds extraordinary, I know. And I am not saying that this FB downtime was due to terrorism.

All I am saying is that it must be worth considering whether FB is vulnerable to a terrorist attack.

How secure are their servers (servers are computers serving large numbers of people)? Are there guards and such-like outside the building? Where are their servers? The location must be an important factor in terms of security. I am talking about physical security. Terrorism could take several forms, hacking or physically damaging the FB computers are the two obvious possibilities.

I don't know whether FB has considered the possibility of a terrorist attack on their servers. But it seems to me that the FB servers make a nice target for terrorists.

To extremists, FB might represent all that is decadent in Western society. Endless chat about nothing. FB is the physical world in the ether of the internet. And FB was created by an American. It is an American product. The extremists in Asia won't like it although I am sure millions of them use it!

The thing is this, if a terrorist brought down Facebook it would be a successful attack at the heart of the Western way of life. Isn't that what Islamic terrorists want?

There is also the matter of all the personal information stored on the FB servers. This information is worth billions of dollars and is probably valuable to terrorists. Terrorist hacking of FB would seem to be a possibility.

FB has become a bit of a monster. It has become too big and too important. It has become more than just a social media website. This is bad for the world.