This Monday on October 4, 2021, Facebook faced major outages of its all three platforms including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. But it turned out that not only were these apps out of work also the internal services of the company’s headquarters were paralyzed.
What happened?
This Monday on October the 4 around noon all the three platforms which Facebook Inc, in Menlo Park California, is the owner of went out of service. Around the evening the same day the work resumed. In a statement issued by a company late in the evening that Monday the reason for the sudden outage was explained: the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between data centers caused the sudden stop. A Facebook employee said the problem was shown as the Domain Name System, a special address book of the internet by which computers find the individual websites. The company assured during this almost six hours blackout no user’s data has been compromised.
But the real interest in the Internet sparked the stories of how the employees of Facebook also got affected by the outage. Some products that workers used, powered by Facebook, were unavailable. The WhatsApp workers couldn’t get to the conference rooms. Communication tools were also unavailable. The journalist from Associated Press Philip Crowther reported the words of a witness on his Twitter page.
Source at Facebook: "it's mayhem over here, all internal systems are down too." Tells me employees are communicating amongst each other by text and by Outlook email.
— Philip Crowther (@PhilipinDC) October 4, 2021
The rumours were also that the specialists who were sent to inspect the data centre in Santa Clara could not access it and used an angle grinder to get to the servers. But soon the information was refuted. Another journalist pointed out on Twitter saying about the whole chaotic situation that was that Facebook employees basically became the captives of IoT.
Don't yet know exactly what's behind the DNS issue that's knocked Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp offline, but it's really bad. Pretty much everything that runs through those three companies are inaccessible. Employees can't even enter conference rooms because they're IoT!
— Kevin Collier (@kevincollier) October 4, 2021
Facebook allegations
The event happened a few days after the allegations that were made on the platform in case of the riot on January 6th at the U.S Capitol. Frances Haugen, a former Facebook data scientist, is scheduled to testify before a Senate subcommittee.
“No one at Facebook is malevolent,” Haugen said during the interview on CBS.“But the incentives are misaligned, right? Like, Facebook makes more money when you consume more content. People enjoy engaging with things that elicit an emotional reaction. And the more anger that they get exposed to, the more they interact and the more they consume”.1
She was interviewed on CBS’ “60 Minutes” where she says that the company doesn’t properly regulate its own algorithms. She hopes the government will interfere to put the right rules on the company’s activity.
