It’s been a rough start to the week for Facebook and its associated brands, its top social media platforms Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, and Facebook all went down with the first outage reports coming in on Monday morning.
After nearly 6+ hours, all the platforms came back online, this was the social media giant’s longest outage in over a while, not only did this irk their users but also shed $7 billion from Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth.
The outage was due to ‘networking issues’.
The timing of the outage is rather absurd as just last week, Facebook’s Safety Chief appeared virtually at a US Congressional hearing about Facebook. During the course of the hearing, Congress questioned her with respect to users’ mental health and privacy concerns.
A major interview about Facebook aired on 60 Minutes last Sunday and Facebook was down by Monday morning. The interview revealed the identity of the ‘Facebook Whistle Blower,’ a former employee who will appear before Congress this coming Tuesday to testify about Facebook’s practices and lack of transparency surrounding hateful content and the spread of misinformation.
The whistleblower, Frances Haugen, was appointed to Civic integrity when she began at Facebook. This department worked towards the reduction of the circulation of false information and hateful content during the time leading up to elections.
The events that followed are what led her to decide to release internal research conducted by Facebook.
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