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View Full Version : Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp hit by global outage



Teh One Who Knocks
10-04-2021, 06:32 PM
By Will Feuer - New York Post


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Facebook-owned properties — including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger — were hit by sweeping outages Monday that left users locked out of the platforms.

The issues started around 11:45 a.m. ET, according to DownDetector, and were hitting users globally.

By 12:30 p.m. ET, the outages appeared to subside, according to DownDetector, though tens of thousands of users were still reporting problems.

Shortly after noon, Facebook’s site returned a message that read, “This site can’t be reached.”

Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman, acknowledged the outage on Twitter, saying, “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

Twitter users responded by mocking the company, saying that “the world would be better if you just left it all switched off” and that “we’re actually enjoying the lack of disinformation and misinformation.”

In a curious twist, by early afternoon, the domain name “Facebook.com” was listed for sale by Domain Tools. The organization behind the domain registration was still listed as Facebook, Inc. and it’s unclear why the site’s address would be listed for sale.

Facebook reportedly said in an internal memo to employees that it appeared “to be a DNS issue that is impacting both internal and external access to our tools and apps,” according to Dylan Byers, a senior correspondent for Puck News.

A DNS, or Domain Name System, connects domain names to the right IP addresses so that people can access popular websites. Earlier this year, an outage at a major DNS operator took out huge swaths of the internet briefly.

Independent cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs also linked the outages to a DNS issue, tweeting that Facebook’s DNS records “got withdrawn this morning from the global routing tables.”

“Can you imagine working at FB right now, when your email no longer works & all your internal FB-based tools fail?” he wrote.

Major websites can also go offline if content delivery networks, or CDNs, crash, which is what happened in June, when a Fastly crash took out major websites including Amazon, Google and The New York Times.

This time around, other sites might be impacted, but the Facebook-owned sites appear to be bearing the brunt of the issues, according to DownDetector.

Cell phone carriers T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T also reported some major outages — though far less sweeping — around the same time as Facebook, according to DownDetector.

“Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it!” Instagram tweeted.

“We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!” WhatsApp added.

Oculus, the Facebook-owned virtual reality gaming platform, was having issues, too.

“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” Oculus tweeted.

Twitter users quickly made “#instagramdown” and “#facebookdown” trending on the platform in response to the outages.

Shares of Facebook were down more than 5 percent on what was already a tough day for the Big Tech stock.

Social media users took to Twitter to complain about the outages and how they tried to restart their internet connection when they could no longer access the Facebook-owned platforms.
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“Me after I restarted my internet router for 5 times and then finding out WhatsApp and co servers are down,” user @_farhankarim wrote, along with an image of a clown.

User @SazMCFC joked that Twitter is “saving the world as WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook crash,” along with an image from the Netflix hit series “Squid Game.”

User @Rocky_Ankomah7 tweeted an image of a repair technician grappling with wires and captioned it, “Mark Zuckerberg trying to fix WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook.”

The outage comes a day after a Facebook whistleblower who leaked a trove of damning internal documents to The Wall Street Journal came forward and identified herself as Frances Haugen, a former product manager at Facebook.

Haugen, 37, said she came forward after seeing Facebook consistently choosing “to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”

She also linked what she characterized as Facebook’s inaction in squashing misinformation and the Jan. 6 US Capitol riot, suggesting that Facebook is at least partially responsible for the fatal event.
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“One of the consequences of how Facebook is picking out that content today is it is optimizing for content that gets engagement, or reaction,” said Haugen.

“But its own research is showing that content that is hateful, that is divisive, that is polarizing, it’s easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions,” said Haugen.

“Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money,” the woman charged.

Haugen is set to testify before Congress this week. She has already filed reams of anonymous complaints against the company with federal authorities.

KevinD
10-04-2021, 11:57 PM
Had no idea.

Griffin
10-05-2021, 12:47 AM
didn't affect me either

deebakes
10-05-2021, 01:54 AM
:lol: nope

Teh One Who Knocks
10-05-2021, 10:17 AM
By Lucas Manfredi , Tyler O'Neil | FOXBusiness


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Facebook announced in a statement late Monday that its platforms are "back up and running" after a massive global outage plunged its main site, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms into the dark earlier in the day.

The company said in a blog post that its engineering teams found that "configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt."

While these platforms are running again, "we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations."

"We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime," the statement read.

Facebook spokesman Andy Stone also tweeted an apology, adding that he was "happy to report [Facebook's services] are coming back online now."

According to DownDetecter, thousands of users across the globe began reporting outages on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and Oculus around 11 a.m. Eastern Time on Monday.

"We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products," Stone tweeted at around noon Monday. "We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience."

Facebook shares fell as much as 5% during Monday's trading session.

"People and businesses around the world rely on us everyday to stay connected. We understand the impact outages like these have on people’s lives, and our responsibility to keep people informed about disruptions to our services. We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient," the company blog post added.

In addition to the temporary outages, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen is set to testify on Tuesday morning against the social media giant. On Sunday, Haugen was revealed on CBS' "60 Minutes" as the woman who anonymously filed complaints with federal law enforcement that Facebook's own research shows how it magnifies hate and misinformation, leads to increased polarization and that Instagram, specifically, can harm teenage girls' mental health.

Haugen claimed that Facebook betrayed "democracy" by allowing the algorithm to push misinformation on its users during the 2020 election. She said the company recognized the risk of misinformation and added safety systems to reduce that risk, but she accused the company of loosening those measures after the election.

"As soon as the election was over, they turned them back off or they changed the settings back to what they were before, to prioritize growth over safety," Haugen said. "And that really feels like a betrayal of democracy to me."

Haugen also leaked internal documents to The Wall Street Journal, dubbed "The Facebook Files," which paint a picture of a company focused on growth and its own interests instead of the public good. Facebook has vehemently denied the allegations.

While it is normal for websites and apps to suffer outages, one on a global scale is rare.

In addition to Facebook, DownDetector had reported that T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T, Google, Twitter, TikTok, Zoom, and Amazon Web Services users were experiencing outages.

However, representatives for Verizon, Amazon and T-Mobile confirmed to FOX Business that DownDetector's report of outages are inaccurate.

"Users across all networks and services are being impacted by other third-party application outages," a T-Mobile spokesperson said.

Meanwhile, Twitter confirmed that some of its users may have had issues seeing replies and direct messages, but that the issue has since been resolved. Google also said there was a "minor issue that affected a small subset of queries on Search" which has since been resolved.

AT&T, TikTok, and Zoom did not immediately return FOX Business' requests for comment.

Fox Business' Tyler O'Neil, David Aaro, Edmund DeMarche and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

deebakes
10-05-2021, 01:21 PM
lies :lol: