The Day After Facebook’s Unprecedented Global Outage Ex-Employee Is Bringing Condemnation To Congress

GayNrd Editors October 5, 2021

The day following an unprecedented global outage that affected billions around the world, a former Facebook data scientist who has stunned lawmakers and the public with revelations of the company’s awareness of apparent harm to some teens from Instagram and her accusations of dishonesty in its fight against hate and misinformation is coming before Congress.

So, someone deleted large sections of the routing….that doesn’t mean Facebook is just down, from the looks of it….that means Facebook is GONE. pic.twitter.com/OCZWPD2okw
— The Academy (@BenjaminEnfield) October 4, 2021

The 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. Haugen went public on CBS’s 60 Minutes program Sunday and is scheduled to testify before a Senate subcommittee Tuesday.

“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,” says Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. https://t.co/wbxxfgorNE pic.twitter.com/zpQIwcdatr
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 3, 2021

Haugen had also anonymously filed complaints with federal law enforcement alleging Facebook’s own research shows how it magnifies hate and misinformation and leads to increased polarization. It also showed that the company was aware that Instagram can harm teenage girls’ mental health.

its my first day interning at facebook guess what i just did LMAOOOOOOO
— myesha thee stallion (@myeshachou) October 4, 2021

New York Times: Facebook and its family of apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, were inaccessible for hours on Monday, taking out a vital communications platform used by billions and showcasing just how dependent the world has become on a company that is under intense scrutiny.

Facebook’s apps — which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus — began displaying error messages around 11:40 a.m. Eastern time, users reported. Within minutes, Facebook had disappeared from the internet. The outage lasted over five hours, before some apps slowly flickered back to life, though the company cautioned the services would take time to stabilize.
Even so, the impact was far-reaching and severe. Facebook has built itself into a linchpin platform with messaging, livestreaming, virtual reality and many other digital services. In some countries, like Myanmar and India, Facebook is synonymous with the internet. More than 3.5 billion people around the world use Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp to communicate with friends and family, distribute political messaging, and expand their businesses through advertising and outreach.

Facebook is also used to sign in to many other apps and services, leading to unexpected domino effects such as people not being able to log into shopping websites or sign into their smart TVs, thermostats and other internet-connected devices.

The Associated Press: Frances Haugen, who has come forward with a wide-ranging condemnation of Facebook, buttressed with tens of thousands of pages of internal research documents she secretly copied before leaving her job in Facebook’s civic integrity unit. Haugen also has filed complaints with federal authorities alleging that Facebook’s own research shows that it amplifies hate, misinformation and political unrest, but the company hides what it knows.

After recent reports in The Wall Street Journal based on documents she leaked to the newspaper raised a public outcry, Haugen revealed her identity in a CBS 60 Minutes interview aired Sunday night. She insisted that “Facebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety.”
The ex-employee challenging the social network giant with 2.8 billion users worldwide and nearly $1 trillion in market value is a 37-year-old data expert from Iowa with a degree in computer engineering and a master’s degree in business from Harvard. She worked for 15 years prior to being recruited by Facebook in 2019 at companies including Google and Pinterest.

“The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world,” says former Facebook employee France Haugen. She points to Myanmar, where the military used Facebook to launch a genocide. https://t.co/WU4IumjHkO pic.twitter.com/cy9Ed9MgbH
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 3, 2021

The New York Times: The revelations have prompted an outcry among regulators, lawmakers and the public. Ms. Haugen, who revealed her identity on Sunday online and on “60 Minutes,” is scheduled to testify on Tuesday in Congress about Facebook’s impact on young users. “Today’s outage brought our reliance on Facebook — and its properties like WhatsApp and Instagram — into sharp relief,” said Brooke Erin Duffy, a professor of communications at Cornell University. “The abruptness of today’s outage highlights the staggering level of precarity that structures our increasingly digitally mediated work economy.”

Instagram and Facebook are currently not working, as are democracy, society and a healthy sense of self.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) October 4, 2021

John Graham-Cumming, the chief technology officer of Cloudflare, a web infrastructure company that helps direct traffic to Facebook, said in an interview that his company became aware of the outage early on and saw the incident’s scope. He described the issue as a “misconfiguration.”

Facebook (accidentally, we assume) sent an update to a deep-level routing protocol on the internet that said, basically, “hey we don’t have any servers any more xoxo”
— alex hern (@alexhern) October 4, 2021

and the messaging service you use to contact the head of physical security to tell them they need to high-tail it to the data centre out east with a physical key to override the smartcard door lock on the front door…
— alex hern (@alexhern) October 4, 2021

“It was as if Facebook just said, ‘Goodbye, we’re leaving now,’” he said.