Above image: h/t Salon, Facebook played huge role in fueling Capitol riot, watchdogs say. (January 2021).
CNN reports, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp go down:
Facebook’s week just went from bad to worse.
Facebook (FB), Instagram and WhatsApp all suffered outages midday Monday, according to public statements from the three Facebook services.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” Facebook said on Twitter [using their competitor?] “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Outage tracking site Down Detector logged tens of thousands of reports for each of the services. Facebook’s own site would not load at all for about an hour on Monday; Instagram and WhatsApp were accessible, but could not load new content or send messages.
The reason for the outage was not immediately clear. However, multiple security experts quickly pointed to a Domain Name System (DNS) problem as a possible culprit. Around 1 pm ET, Cisco’s internet analysis division ThousandEyes said on Twitter that its tests indicate the outage is due to an ongoing DNS failure. The DNS translates website names into IP addresses that can be read by a computer. It’s often called the “phonebook of the internet.”
More than four hours after the outage started, Facebook CTO Mark Schroepfer tweeted: “We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”
[T]he fact that a company of Facebook’s size and resources has been offline for over three hours suggests there is no quick fix for the issue.
Roland Dobbins, principal engineer at digital security firm Netscout, said Facebook will likely work to gradually restore service, and that it could take some time for routed information “to be received and propagated worldwide.”
The outage came the morning after “60 Minutes” aired a segment in which Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen claimed the company is aware of how its platforms are used to spread hate, violence and misinformation, and that 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. Haugen is set to testify before a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday.
The New York Times reports, Whistle-Blower Says Facebook ‘Chooses Profits Over Safety’:
John Tye, the founder of Whistleblower Aid, a legal nonprofit that represents people seeking to expose potential lawbreaking, was contacted this spring through a mutual connection by a woman who claimed to have worked at Facebook.
The woman told Mr. Tye and his team something intriguing: She had access to tens of thousands of pages of internal documents from the world’s largest social network. In a series of calls, she asked for legal protection and a path to releasing the confidential information. Mr. Tye, who said he understood the gravity of what the woman brought “within a few minutes,” agreed to represent her and call her by the alias “Sean.”
She “is a very courageous person and is taking a personal risk to hold a trillion-dollar company accountable,” he said.
On Sunday, Frances Haugen revealed herself to be “Sean,” the whistle-blower against Facebook. A product manager who worked for nearly two years on the civic misinformation team at the social network before leaving in May, Ms. Haugen has used the documents she amassed to expose how much Facebook knew about the harms that it was causing and provided the evidence to lawmakers, regulators and the news media.
In an interview with “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday, Ms. Haugen, 37, said she had grown alarmed by what she saw at Facebook. The company repeatedly put its own interests first rather than the public’s interest, she said. So she copied pages of Facebook’s internal research and decided to do something about it.
“I’ve seen a bunch of social networks and it was substantially worse at Facebook than what I had seen before,” Ms. Haugen said. She added, “Facebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety.”
Ms. Haugen gave many of the documents to The Wall Street Journal, which last month began publishing the findings. The revelations — including that Facebook knew Instagram was worsening body image issues among teenagers and that it had a two-tier justice system — have spurred criticism from lawmakers, regulators and the public.
Ms. Haugen has also filed a whistle-blower complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission, accusing Facebook of misleading investors with public statements that did not match its internal actions. And she has talked with lawmakers such as Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat of Connecticut, and Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican of Tennessee, and shared subsets of the documents with them.
The spotlight on Ms. Haugen is set to grow brighter. On Tuesday, she is scheduled to testify in Congress about Facebook’s impact on young users.
Ms. Haugen’s actions were a sign of how Facebook has turned increasingly leaky. As the company has grown into a behemoth with over 63,000 employees, some of them have become dissatisfied as it has lurched from controversy to controversy over data privacy, misinformation and hate speech.
[F]acebook did not directly address Ms. Haugen late Sunday. Lena Pietsch, a company spokeswoman, said it was continuing “to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content. To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true.”
In preparation for revealing herself, Ms. Haugen and her team set up a Twitter account for her and a personal website. On the website, Ms. Haugen was described as “an advocate for public oversight of social media.”
A native of Iowa City, Iowa, Ms. Haugen studied electrical and computer engineering at Olin College and got an M.B.A. from Harvard, the website said. She then worked on algorithms at Google, Pinterest and Yelp. In June 2019, she joined Facebook. There, she handled democracy and misinformation issues, as well as working on counterespionage, according to the website.
Ms. Haugen’s complaint to the S.E.C. was based on her document trove and consisted of many cover letters, seven of which were obtained by The Times. Each letter detailed a different topic — such as Facebook’s role in spreading misinformation after the 2020 election and the impact its products have on teenagers’ mental health — and accused the company of making “material misrepresentations and omissions in statements to investors and prospective investors.”
The letters compared public statements and disclosures to lawmakers made by Mr. Zuckerberg and other top Facebook executives to the company’s internal research and documents. In one cover letter, Ms. Haugen said Facebook contributed to election misinformation and the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Earlier: Whistle-Blower to Accuse Facebook of Contributing to Jan. 6 Riot, Memo Says. The Associated Press, Ex-Facebook manager alleges social network fed Capitol riot.
While “Facebook has publicized its work to combat misinformation and violent extremism relating to the 2020 election and insurrection,” Ms. Haugen’s documents told a different story, one cover letter read. “In reality, Facebook knew its algorithms and platforms promoted this type of harmful content, and it failed to deploy internally recommended or lasting countermeasures.”
Mr. Tye said he had been in touch with the S.E.C.’s whistle-blower office and division of enforcement regarding Facebook. The S.E.C. typically provides protections for corporate tipsters that shield them from retaliation. The agency also provides awards of 10 percent to 30 percent to whistle-blowers if their tips lead to successful enforcement actions that yield monetary penalties of more than $1 million.
After filing the S.E.C. complaint, Ms. Haugen and her legal team contacted Mr. Blumenthal and Ms. Blackburn, Mr. Tye said. The lawmakers had held a hearing in May about protecting children online, focusing on how companies like Facebook were collecting data through apps like Instagram.
In August, Mr. Blumenthal and Ms. Blackburn sent a letter to Mr. Zuckerberg asking Facebook to disclose its internal research about how its services were affecting children’s mental health. Facebook responded with a letter that played up its apps’ positive effects on children and deflected questions about internal research.
But documents from Ms. Haugen showed that Facebook’s researchers have performed many studies on the effects that its products can have on teenagers, Mr. Blumenthal said in an interview last week. The company had engaged in “concealment and deception,” he said.
In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Blumenthal said Ms. Haugen “has proved to be credible, courageous and compelling from her first visit with my office in late summer.”
Some of Ms. Haugen’s documents have also been distributed to the state attorneys general for California, Vermont, Tennessee, Massachusetts and Nebraska, Mr. Tye said.
But he said the documents were not shared with the Federal Trade Commission, which has filed an antitrust suit against Facebook. In a video posted by Whistleblower Aid on Sunday, Ms. Haugen said she did not believe breaking up Facebook would solve the problems inherent at the company.
“The path forward is about transparency and governance,” she said in the video. “It’s not about breaking up Facebook.”
Why the hell not? Facebook is evil.
Ms. Haugen has also spoken to lawmakers in France and Britain, as well as a member of European Parliament. This month, she is scheduled to appear before a British parliamentary committee. That will be followed by stops at Web Summit, a technology conference in Lisbon, and in Brussels to meet with European policymakers in November, Mr. Tye said.
On Sunday, a GoFundMe page that Whistleblower Aid created for Ms. Haugen also went live. Noting that Facebook had “limitless resources and an army of lawyers,” the group set a goal of raising $10,000. Within 30 minutes, 18 donors had given $1,195. Shortly afterward, the fund-raising goal was increased to $50,000.
Facebook is a sewer.
As an IT guy I find it hilarious that the employees were locked out of the buildings.
They appear to have their security systems tied to the rest of the network, probably, knowing the mindset of Silicon Valley exec’s, tied to their Facebook accounts.
Which is even more hilarious-er.
Bad architectural choices, and not to get too into the jargon, we call thIs “the sewer backing up”.
More technical details show that the problem is not the DNS itself, but rather that the BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) routing for the FB domain system has been withdrawn or otherwise misconfigured quite possibly by FB itself.
From WIRED: “Facebook’s outage appears to be caused by DNS; however that’s a just symptom of the problem,” says Troy Mursch, chief research officer of cyberthreat intelligence company Bad Packets. The fundamental issue, Mursch says—and other experts agree—is that Facebook has withdrawn the so-called Border Gateway Protocol route that contains the IP addresses of its DNS nameservers. If DNS is the internet’s phone book, BGP is its navigation system; it decides what route data takes as it travels the information superhighway.”
I have the impression that this is a technical screw-up. From the same article: But the internet infrastructure experts who spoke to WIRED all suggested the likeliest answer was a misconfiguration on Facebook’s part. “It appears that Facebook has done something to their routers, the ones that connect the Facebook network to the rest of the internet,” says John Graham-Cumming, CTO of internet infrastructure company Cloudflare [who says he doesn’t know the details of what happened.]
Let’s not hop on the conspiracy bandwagon just yet.