Facebook Inc platforms, Facebook.com, Instagram, WhatsApp are back online a rare shutdown of the three apps worldwide.
We had reported that the outage which happened yesterday afternoon affected all Mark Zuckerberg shared infrastructure apps, plunging the services and the businesses and people who rely on them into chaos for hours.
Facebook in a response late last night while apologizing for the shutdown said that “the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change” and that there is “no evidence that user data was compromised as a result” of the outage.
Techbooky had earlier reported a separate Facebook scandal involving, Frances Haugen, a former employer, cum whistleblower who had gone public on CBS’s ’60 minutes’ program on Sunday to accuse Facebook of magnifying hate and increased misinformation to make profit.
She had earlier anonymously filed complaints with the Federal law enforcement authorities accusing Facebook knowing through its in house research that the San Francisco Company magnifies hate, misinformation which leads to increased polarization. In the ‘filed’ complaint, she also showed that the Facebook was aware its sister app, Instagram has the tendency to harm teenage girls mental health.
Facebook has since denied the accusations, branding them malicious and misleading, with the company’s Vice-president of Policy and Policy affairs, Nick Clegg writing to Facebook employees in a memo that “social media has had a big impact on society in recent years, and Facebook is often a place where much of this debate plays out.”
The social media platform had in 2019suffered its biggest outage in years – and said only that it had “triggered an issue” during “routine maintenance operations”, with CEO Mark Zuckerbeg in a leaked transcript opining that suchoutages are a “big deal”. Any problems can often lead people to start using competitors instead, and noted that it can take “months” to win back trust and get people back on Facebook’s platforms – if they come back at all.
While users grapple with the implication of the outage on their personal conversation and business opportunities, Facebook first public comment was a tweet acknowledging that “some people are having trouble accessing (the) Facebook app” and said it was working on restoring access.
Instagram head, Adam Mosseri also tweeted that it feels like a “snow day.”
Chief Technology Officer of Facebook, Mike Schroepfer, later tweeted “sincere apologies.”
In statement on Monday evening, Facebook while explaining the remote cause of the outage said the changes on routers coordinating network traffic between data centers interrupted communication, and then had “a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
There were insinuations in the public fore that the outage may have been due to a hack by some Chinese developer but there was no evidence to the effect of having malicious activities involved in the issue. CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince dismissed hacking insinuations when he tweeted that “nothing we’re seeing related to the Facebook services outage suggests it was an attack.”
Facebook itself hasn’t responded to inquiries by the public on the possibility of the attack being caused by malicious activities.
Ayoola Faseyi, an Abuja based Journalist with interest in Technology and Politics. He is a versatile writer with articles in many renowned News Journals.
He is the Co-Founder of media brand, The Vent Republic.
