Facebook’s Monday Outage

On Monday, Oct. 4, from 11:40 a.m. EST to 6:30 p.m. EST, Facebook and all Facebook products—Instagram, Messenger, Oculus, and WhatsApp — started displaying error messages to users and stopped displaying new post feeds. While this is not the first time Facebook has had issues with outages—in light of recent Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s testimony—this outage generated strong attention in the news and media. At around 2 p.m. EST the following Friday, Facebook seemed to be down again for two hours, which Facebook said was unrelated to Monday’s outage.

Monday evening, after the servers were running again, Facebook released a comment explaining their theory for the outage, stating “the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication,” which in turn brought all Facebook services to a halt.

John Graham-Cumming, the CTO of Cloudflare described Facebook’s issue as “misconfiguration” with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), similar to the GPS system or Postal Service of the internet. The BGP serves as a navigation system that interacts with the DNS server (Domain Name System) and decides how the website data and information will navigate to your phone, computer or any technological device. If the BGP cannot decide how to deliver the site’s information to your device, the device will interpret the site as nonexistent.

“It was as if Facebook just said, ‘Goodbye, we’re leaving now,’” Graham-Cumming said in an interview. Facebook claims no user data was compromised during its downtime. Friday’s outage was caused by a “configuration change,” not a BGC or DNS issue.

Roughly 3.5 billion people use at least one of Facebook’s products, some of which lost a day’s worth of work during the Monday outage. Any other websites and apps that use Facebook accounts to sign in were also inaccessible.

https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/1445078208190291973

Many businesses and shops that rely on Facebook and/or Instagram for advertising and selling struggled to maintain business operations during the Monday outage. Mark Donnely, the founder of HUH Clothing, said he lost thousands of sales during the outage.

“It may not sound like a lot to others, but missing out on four or five hours of sales could be the difference between paying the electricity bill or rent for the month,” he said.

Similar to Donnely, Jessica Ferrandino, the owner of The Curated Vintage, had no choice but to cancel a live sale event to be hosted on Instagram Stories, stating that this disruption in her main marketing and business outlet was a “definitely a potential financial loss.”

Facebook predominantly uses its own products for internal communication and business, leaving many of its employees with no way to do their job, or in some cases, even enter company buildings and conference rooms during the outages.

Facebook’s stock value decreased by nearly 5% by the end of Monday, cutting Zuckerberg’s net worth by $6 billion as well. Since Monday’s outage, Twitter, Reddit and other social media have gone rampant with #facebookdown memes.

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Facebook Whistleblower

Former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen leaked documents revealing the harsh truth the company was hiding late in September 2021.

Creating new spaces and owning other apps, such as Instagram and Whatsapp, allowed the company to tower and dominate its competitors. After Haugen released thousands of documents from Facebook’s own research, it showed that their success was at the cost of their users.

Haugen states that Facebook amplifies hate, misinformation and political unrest. She describes Facebook and Instagram as “distinctly worse than other forms of social media.”

The social media platform is widely used around the world. In developing countries, it is being used for human trafficking, drug-dealing and to promote ethnic violence. Facebook employees regularly flagged information about drug cartels and human traffickers on the platform but the company’s response was inadequate.

Jeff Horwitz—a technology reporter at The Wall Street Journal—covered Facebook’s business and their impact on the world through a collection called The Facebook Files.

He said employees flagged human traffickers in the Middle East using the site to lure women into abusive employment situations as well as armed groups in Ethiopia using the site to incite violence against ethnic minorities. They also sent alerts to their bosses about organ selling, pornography and government action against political dissent, according to the leaked documents.

In 2019, Apple threatened to remove Facebook from the app store if they did not get human trafficking under control. This threat led Facebook to take aggressive action to shut down accounts engaging in harmful activities on its platform.

Misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines spread on the platform. Facebook owner and CEO Mark Zuckerburg made it a goal to promote the vaccine but users used the platform against them to spread doubts about the pandemic and threats of the vaccine. This shows that not even the chief executive can control the platform and steer users in the right direction.

Instagram’s features create harm towards users in a unique way. Unlike Facebook, Instagram can attract a younger audience who have seemingly become addicted.

The way Instagram is designed has been found to encourage young women to compare themselves to others, making them constantly think about their flaws. Research shows that 32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made it worse. People are attracted to content that resonates with them. With this content, there is a feedback loop that engages users with specific content.

With this loop, one-in-three teen girls’ body image worsens. According to Haugen, 13.5% of teen girls say Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse and 7% of teen girls say Instagram makes eating disorders worse. Instagram has also taken a toll on teens’ mental health, causing depression.

A part of their recent research has shown that they are looking to reach “untapped” audiences so they can “try to understand how teens and preteens use technology and to appeal to the next generation” says Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram.

Haugen went to Congress on Oct. 5 and testified about Facebook’s wrongdoing.

The hearing had a few major key takeaways. Republican and Democratic lawmakers united on taking action to stop the harm caused to teenagers on Facebook. Previous bills were proposed to provide safety provisions for young users, but Haugen insisted that the minimum age to use social media be raised from 13 to 17 years old.

During the hearing, lawmakers explored how Facebook’s algorithms create problems and how the company can choose when to tweak the algorithm to highlight or suppress certain content.

In her testimony, she told lawmakers to demand more documents and internal research from Facebook with hopes that complete transparency may allow Congress to understand and regulate more effectively.