Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms are back online after a massive global outage plunged the social networks into chaos for hours. Facebook cited a 'faulty configuration change” and says there’s no evidence user data was compromised.
FILE - In this March 29, 2018, file photo, the logo for Facebook appears on screens at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York's Times Square. Facebook prematurely turned off safeguards designed to thwart misinformation and rabble rousing after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 elections in a moneymaking move that a company whistleblower alleges contributed to the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, invasion of the U.S. Capitol.
Facebook was already in the throes of a separate major crisis after whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, provided The Wall Street Journal with internal documents that exposed the company’s awareness of harms caused by its products and decisions. Haugenon CBS’s “60 Minutes” program Sunday and is scheduled to testify before a Senate subcommittee Tuesday.
For hours, Facebook’s only public comment was a tweet in which it acknowledged that “some people are having trouble accessing Facebook app” and said it was working on restoring access. Regarding the internal failures, Instagram head Adam Mosseri tweeted that it feels like a “snow day.”In Monday night’s statement, Facebook blamed changes on routers that coordinate network traffic between data centers.
But the impact was far worse for multitudes of Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users, showing just how much the world has come to rely on it and its properties — to run businesses, connect with online communities, log on to multiple other websites and even order food.