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Key Points
• Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down for 5 hours on Monday
• Security experts are saying it is maybe due to a DNS problem
• The outage followed Frances Haugen, a whistleblower, gave an interview to “60 Minutes”
All the services of Facebook Inc went down on Monday for millions of users across the world, according to reports filed in DownDetector.
Social media platform Facebook and its messaging platform Messenger, photo-sharing platform Instagram, and instant-messaging service provider WhatsApp stopped were not working as of 11:42 am ET.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” Facebook tweeted.
Facebook’s website and the app did not load for about an hour; Instagram and WhatsApp were accessible but could not load new content or send messages.
Although the reason for the outage was not apparent, multiple security experts pointed to Domain Name System (DNS) problem.
Facebook under magnifying glass
The worldwide outage occurred following the Sunday “60 Minutes” aired an interview with a whistleblower, who identified himself as Frances Haugen--a data scientist--who claimed Facebook is aware of how its platforms are used to spread hate, violence, and misinformation. He claimed that rather than try to act on that information, Facebook has tried to hide that evidence.
The interview followed weeks of reporting about, and criticism of Facebook after Haugen released thousands of pages of internal documents to regulators and the Wall Street Journal.
The Senate subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security started probing after WSJ published a series of articles.
“We’re here today because Facebook has shown us once again that it is incapable of holding itself accountable,” Blumenthal said in his opening remarks last week.
Facebook’s global head of safety, Antigone Davis, in written testimony, stated, “We strongly disagree with how this reporting characterized our work, so we want to be clear about what that research shows, and what it does not show,” in the wake of recent reporting questioning internal research, and the research the company do to better understand young people’s experiences on Instagram.
Haugen is set to testify before a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday.
Shares of Facebook were down about 6%, putting it on pace for its worst trading day in nearly a year.
Picture Credit: Yahoo Finance