BY PAULA BOLYARD | P J MEDIA
As of publishing time, Facebook has been down for several hours, along with WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Oculus VR. But that’s just the beginning. The social media behemoth’s stock prices also crashed on Monday, making the company’s already bad day even worse. The plummet in stock prices came as a Facebook executive was on CNBC defending the company against claims by a whistleblower that the company prioritized profit over the safety of young Facebook users.
Oh, and speaking of that Facebook whistleblower—who
leaked a bunch of documents to the Wall Street Journal a while back—she
unmasked herself on “60 Minutes” last night.
Let’s start with the outages. Facebook, WhatsApp, and
Instagram had to take to Twitter to let users know that the platforms were experiencing
problems:
Users who tried to access Instagram and WhatsApp were
greeted by a 5xx server error, while Messenger and Facebook have been buggy all
day, with most users reporting that they’re unable to use the platforms.
There are also problems being reported with Oculus VR,
the Facebook-owned virtual reality system. Users are reportedly able to use
games they’ve already uploaded to their systems, but cannot install new games.
Social features are also not working.
Downdetector reports that the Facebook problems began at
around 11 a.m.
In a weird twist to this story, IsItDownNowRightNow, a
website that tracks internet outages, seems to be having problems of its own,
with the site being unreachable at times, possibly because half the internet is
trying to find out what’s going on with Facebook.
And now there are reports coming in about issues with
Gmail, according
to Downdetector:
There’s been no word yet from Facebook about what’s
causing the problems. but earlier in the day Brian Krebs, an investigative
journalist who focuses on cyber security issues, tweeted
this: “Confirmed: The DNS records that tell systems how to find http://Facebook.com or http://Instagram.com 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withdrawn this morning from the global routing tables.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?”
Krebs wrote on his website, Krebs on Security, “We don’t
yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning,
something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that
tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to find these
destinations online.”
He added:
Doug Madory is director of internet analysis
at Kentik, a San Francisco-based network monitoring
company. Madory said at approximately 11:39 a.m. ET today (15:39 UTC), someone
at Facebook caused an update to be made to the company’s Border Gateway
Protocol (BGP) records. BGP is a mechanism by which Internet service providers
of the world share information about which providers are responsible for
routing Internet traffic to which specific groups of Internet addresses.
In simpler terms, sometime this morning Facebook took
away the map telling the world’s computers how to find its various online
properties. As a result, when one types Facebook.com into a web browser, the
browser has no idea where to find Facebook.com, and so returns an error page.
To make matters worse, Facebook employees are not able to
communicate with one another because the company’s email and other tools are
managed in-house using the same domain. Oh, and this is happening:
Krebs said the changes “had to have come from inside the
company,” although it’s not known if this was done maliciously or by accident.
Adding insult to injury, several domain registration
companies are showing the Facebook.com domain as for sale.
Meanwhile, Facebook’s stock today plummeted - it’s still got a way to go before it reaches the 52-week low, but that may yet happen today. Cry me a river.
On Sunday night, now-unmasked Facebook whistleblower
Frances Haugen spoke out against the company’s policies on “60 Minutes.” Haugen,
a former product manager for Facebook’s civic misinformation team (why do the
job titles at Facebook always sound like they were invented by George Orwell?),
said the company is “paying for its profits with our safety.”
Haugen told host Scott Pelley, “The thing I saw at
Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what
was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and
over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”
Haugen, who worked at both Google and Pinterest before
joining Facebook, said the company was “substantially worse” than anything
she’d seen before, which led her to leak tens of thousands of documents
revealing the company’s internal research.
Pelley asked about one particular document that showed
Facebook admitting it had evidence that “hate speech, divisive political speech
and misinformation on Facebook and the family of apps are affecting societies
around the world.”
“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,” accused Haugen.
In what may or may not be a coincidence, Facebook’s vice
president of content policy, Monika Bickert, went on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday morning just as
the stock began to crater.
Bickert defended Facebook’s policies, saying, “If we were
a company who didn’t care about safety, if we were about trying to prioritize
profit over safety, we wouldn’t do this kind of research.”
“The whole point is understanding how we can be better
and make a better experience,” she said.
Meanwhile, the Twitterverse is having a field day with
Facebook’s terrible, horrible, no good very bad day, with many saying that
we’re all probably better off with it out.
I’m picturing it more like this:
Another famed leaker weighed in:
That’s an excellent point, no? Media companies, in
particular, have been increasingly dependent on Facebook to get the news out on
a platform that has shown not only hostility toward conservative points of
view, but a willingness to work with the White House to sway elections and
spread Democrat talking points.
PJ
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