WASHINGTON, DC — Facebook battled dueling crises Monday as
potentially billions of users were impacted when its dominant social network went offline
for seven hours, and the company fought against a whistleblower's damning
revelations.
اضافة اعلان
Many long-held fears and criticisms about the platform seem to have been
backed up by Facebook's own research, which ex-worker Frances Haugen has turned
over to authorities and the Wall Street Journal.
But as US senators prepared for her highly anticipated Tuesday testimony on
the documents, Facebook went offline in an outage that hit users across its
platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp.
"Billions of users have been impacted by the services being entirely
offline today," tracker Downdetector wrote on its website.
Facebook apologized in a tweet later Monday Silicon Valley time, just as the
apps started to go back online.
"We've been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and
are happy to report they are coming back online now," the company
added.
Facebook late Monday blamed the outage on configuration changes it made to
routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centers.
"This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way
our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt," Facebook
vice president of infrastructure Santosh Janardhan said in a post.
Cyber security expert Brian Krebs described what happened as Facebook taking
away "the map telling the world's computers how to find its various online
properties."
In addition to the disruption to people, businesses and others that rely on
the company's tools, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a financial hit.
Fortune's billionaire tracking website late Monday said Zuckerberg's
personal fortune plunged by nearly $6 billion from the prior day to land at
just under $117 billion.
For Facebook's rivals, it was a good day, however.
The messaging service Telegram went from the 56th most downloaded free app
in the US to the fifth, according to specialist firm SensorTower.
The encrypted messaging app Signal tweeted that "millions" of new
users had joined.
It was not the only Twitter user to crack jokes over the outage, though
others complained about being cut off from contacts, their sources of income,
or business tools.
Some were philosophical, however — such as Cindy Bennett, a baker in New
York City, who told AFP: "I think the world would probably be a better
place if everybody didn't know what everybody else was doing every second of
every minute of every day."
'Make body
dissatisfaction worse'
Facebook has pushed back hard against the outrage regarding its practices
and impact, but this is just the latest crisis to hit the business.
US lawmakers for years have threatened to regulate Facebook and other social
media giants to address criticisms that the platforms trample on privacy,
provide a megaphone for dangerous misinformation, and damage young people's
well-being.
After years of criticism directed at social media, without major legislative
overhauls, some experts were skeptical that change was coming.
"This is a situation where there's going to be a lot of smoke, and a
lot of fury, but not a lot of action," said Mark Hass, an Arizona State
University professor
"It's going to have to come down to the platforms, feeling pressure
from their users feeling pressure from their employees," he added, noting
authorities won't effectively be able to regulate content.
Haugen, a 37-year-old data scientist from Iowa, has worked for companies
including Google and Pinterest — but said in an interview with CBS news show
"60 Minutes" that Facebook was "substantially worse" than
anything she had seen before.
Facebook's vice president of policy and global affairs Nick Clegg vehemently
pushed back at the assertion its platforms are "toxic" for teens,
days after a tense, hours-long congressional hearing in which US lawmakers
grilled the company over its impact on the mental health of young users.
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