The company already spends a small fortune to run Facebook, including the cost of
thousands of servers to handle the burden of users uploading 350,000 photos and videos
and generating eight billion video views per day. Allowing users to download
every video and Reels vid on the system would require adding thousands of additional
servers — and that’s an expense Facebook doesn’t want to incur.
It's easier and cleaner to set up the app so most downloads, including downloads of
all Reels videos, are prohibited by default. We think that’s a shame, but we’re
fortunate; we don’t have to worry about the cost of running the world’s biggest social
app. It costs us very little to take Reels from FB’s servers and let you download
them, and we’re happy to do it.