Headline Roundup • October 5th, 2021
Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram Back Up After Major Outage
Summary from the AllSides News Team
Social media services Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram experienced a major worldwide outage on Monday. The company says the outage was due to an internal technical issue related to faulty configuration changes in the company's internal tools. The failure disrupted the digital lives of many politicians, small-business owners, aid workers and others. The outage also reportedly hampered Facebook's ability to fix the crash and employees' abilities to access company tools. The company is already under fire after a whistle-blower, Frances Haugen, shared internal documents claiming that Facebook knows of its negative impacts on public health but chooses to prioritize profit.
The news was covered prominently across the spectrum with few partisan divides in coverage.
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Source: AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee
Facebook issued a statement late Monday explaining what caused the outage across its platforms lasted nearly six hours.
“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication,” the statement said. “This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
Facebook indicated that there’s “no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”
The outage affected Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp,...
Ed Jones/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
For more than five hours on Monday, the world got a taste of life without Facebook and its apps.
People in many places discovered that Facebook and its apps had burrowed their way into nearly every facet of existence.
In Mexico, politicians were cut off from their constituents. In Turkey, shopkeepers couldn’t sell their wares. And in Colombia, a nonprofit organization that uses WhatsApp to connect victims of gender-based violence to lifesaving services found its work impaired.
“Because we have a field team, we were able to mitigate some of...
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Social media services Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are back up and running after an outage that lasted almost six hours, Facebook says.
It blamed an internal technical issue, which not only affected Facebook's services, but reportedly also employees' work passes and email.
The services were down from about 16:00 GMT until around 22:00 on Monday.
But the company said there was "no evidence that user data was compromised".
Sheera Frenkel, the New York Times' technology reporter, told the Today programme part of the reason it took so long to fix...
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