14 DAY TRIAL // We all know Facebook is extremely popular when it comes to the number of Internet users accessing its webpage. Alexa placed Facebook on position number 7, while compete.com estimates the social networking service has almost 30 million visitors per month. Impressive, isn't it? Certainly yes, but this popularity is not useful all the time. For example, today's piece of news comes to support my statement. Today, the Associated Press informed that Facebook became unavailable to Syrian users, after the authorities took the decision to ban the social network in the entire country due to numerous risks caused by its users.
Apparently, the ban was applied after it had been reported that some Israeli users had attempted to infiltrate Syrian networks formed and maintained by local people. Since this can easily cause an important information leak, the official thought it's better to prevent the problems by banning the entire service.
According to AP, Facebook is unavailable inside the Syrian capital Damascus, all of them getting a blank page when attempting to load the official website of the social network service. Although it was not confirmed yet, it seems that the restriction was set up almost two weeks ago, but nobody said a thing about it.
So, Facebook is banned again and this happened because it is way too popular. Imagine that if Facebook had less visitors who were not so attracted by the social network, the authorities could avoid banning it as there was no Israeli infiltration inside the Syrian networks. But, as Facebook attracts approximately 250,000 new users every day (as it was said at the announcement of the Microsoft - Facebook deal), it may easily turn into a threat.
This wouldn't be the first time when Facebook gets banned because the social network is unavailable in numerous countries and more specifically, in several companies around the world. Lots of employers considered that people spent too much time on Facebook and decided to ban it, in order to avoid an impact over the company's productivity.