Facebook worried its servers will 'melt down' over coronavirus panic

I can only imagine the type of load that digital infrastructure is under right now, with hundreds of millions of people forced to stay at home over the current coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak -- but especially Facebook.

During a conference call on Wednesday to address Facebook's response to coronavirus COVID-19, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the number of voice calls on both Messenger and WhatsApp in Italy have skyrocketed, as well as many other countries around the world as people keep in contact with their loved ones.

Now that more and more people are at home using social media, it has seen a gigantic surge in activity on Facebook's servers. The social media giant has increased its infrastructure and server capacity, with Facebook noting it has doubled the server capacity for WhatsApp.

Zuckerberg explained to the press: "This isn't a massive outbreak in the majority of countries around the world yet. But if it gets there, then we really need to make sure we're on top of this from an infrastructure perspective to make sure that things don't melt down. We are on a sustained basis well beyond what that spike is on New Year's. Just making sure that we can manage that is the challenge that we're trying to make sure that we can stay in front of".