IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/zewdip/314420.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Competition among digital services: Evidence from the 2021 Meta outage

Author

Listed:
  • Rehse, Dominik
  • Valet, Sebastian

Abstract

On October 4, 2021, all services provided by Meta Platforms, Inc. (then Facebook, Inc.) became unavailable unexpectedly for all its worldwide users for a period of about six hours. We use detailed high-frequency tracking data from smartphones, tablets and desktop computers of thousands of Meta users from Spain and the United States to study their behavioral responses during the outage. We find (1) the strongest substi- tution occurs within social media and messaging services, (2) evidence of substitution across service categories, (3) substitution patterns that vary across demographic groups, (4) substantially higher substitution rates among multi-homers, (5) substitution rates that increase over the course of the outage, (6) distinct differences in substitution patterns between countries, and (7) increased usage of non-Meta digital services after the outage. To our knowledge, this study presents the first comprehensive revealed-preference analysis of substitution patterns when an entire user population simultaneously seeks alternatives to major digital services.

Suggested Citation

  • Rehse, Dominik & Valet, Sebastian, 2025. "Competition among digital services: Evidence from the 2021 Meta outage," ZEW Discussion Papers 25-015, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
  • Handle: RePEc:zbw:zewdip:314420
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/314420/1/1920404554.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Digital services; Competition; Substitution; Attention markets; Outage;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L40 - Industrial Organization - - Antitrust Issues and Policies - - - General
    • L82 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Entertainment; Media
    • L86 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Information and Internet Services; Computer Software

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:zewdip:314420. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/zemande.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.