What caused Facebook outage? Duke cybersecurity expert explains

David Hoffman is a public policy professor at Duke and cybersecurity expert.

He says Facebook's blackout is a huge deal financially, but is still unclear about whether is was a hack or a software update that did not go as planned.

"Even the best cybersecurity protections are not going to make it such that you're not going to get hacked," said Hoffman. "Going down is the worst case scenario for any of these platforms but it can happen and it just did."

Hoffman noted how many businesses have built their livelihoods around the website.

"A lot of other people have constructed their business and their lives to depend on Facebook and these services and this is yet another reminder for certain technology platforms that we design into our lives, that we always have to be worried about building for some resilience. Whether it's your internet service provider, a cloud provider that you're hosting your business with or a social media platform you're dependent on for marketing," said Hoffman. "I think there's real questions about the degree to which people are going to continue to trust and design their lives around the platform."