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Post by Admin on Oct 4, 2021 20:18:11 GMT
If you can't access Facebook, Instagram, Messenger or WhatsApp, you're not the only one. Starting at approximately 11:38AM ET, Downdetector began logging a spike in outage reports across all four Facebook-owned services. Andy Stone, a spokesperson for the company, said at 12:07PM ET that the company was working to resolve the issue quickly. The error page you see when trying to connect to the platforms suggests a Domain Name System (DNS) error is responsible for the outage. 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. — Andy Stone (@andymstone) October 4, 2021 It's not clear how widespread the issue is, but Downdetector shows more than 30,000 outage reports for Facebook alone, with another 20,000 tied to Instagram. Per a tweet from the official Oculus Twitter account, the problem is also affecting the Oculus App, Store and website. It may take some time for Facebook to resolve the issue. According to The New York Times, the outage has also taken out Workplace, the company's internal communications platform. Additionally, employees reportedly can't receive external emails at the moment. We've reached out to Facebook for more information. Per journalist Brian Krebs, Facebook's DNS records were withdrawn from the global routing tables sometime this morning."We don't know why this change was made," Krebs wrote in a tweet. "It could well have been the result of an internal, system-wide change or update that went awry. It's all speculation at this point why. Facebook alone is in control over its DNS records."
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Post by Admin on Oct 4, 2021 21:47:26 GMT
Original story 1:26 pm EDT: Facebook—and apparently all the major services Facebook owns—are down today. We first noticed the problem at about 11:30 am Eastern time, when some Facebook links stopped working. Investigating a bit further showed major DNS failures at Facebook: DNS—short for Domain Name System—is the service that translates human-readable hostnames (like arstechnica.com) to raw, numeric IP addresses (like 18.221.249.245). Without working DNS, your computer doesn't know how to get to the servers that host the website you're looking for. The problem goes deeper than Facebook's obvious DNS failures, though. Facebook-owned Instagram was also down, and its DNS services—which are hosted on Amazon rather than being internal to Facebook's own network—were functional. Instagram and WhatsApp were reachable but showed HTTP 503 failures (no server is available for the request) instead, an indication that while DNS worked and the services' load balancers were reachable, the application servers that should be feeding the load balancers were not. A bit later, Cloudflare VP Dane Knecht reported that all BGP routes for Facebook had been pulled. (BGP—short for Border Gateway Protocol—is the system by which one network figures out the best route to a different network.) With no BGP routes into Facebook's network, Facebook's own DNS servers would be unreachable—as would the missing application servers for Facebook-owned Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus VR. Not long after that, Reddit user u/ramenporn reported on the r/sysadmin subreddit that BGP peering with Facebook is down, probably due to a configuration change that was pushed shortly before the outages began. According to u/ramenporn—who claims to be a Facebook employee and part of the recovery efforts—this is most likely a case of Facebook network engineers pushing a config change that inadvertently locked them out, meaning that the fix must come from data center technicians with local, physical access to the routers in question. The withdrawn routes do not appear to be the result of nor related to any malicious attack on Facebook's infrastructure.
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Post by Admin on Oct 5, 2021 2:23:05 GMT
Facebook's platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp, suffered from widespread outages Monday. The global outages continued for about 7 hours. Facebook and Instagram appear to have recovered as of Monday afternoon around 6 p.m. Eastern. At 6:33 p.m., the company confirmed that its services had been restored. "To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us," the official Facebook Twitter feed announced. Facebook spokesman Andy Stone also tweeted an apology, adding that he was "happy to report [Facebook's services] are coming back online now." According to DownDetecter, thousands of users across the globe began reporting outages on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and Oculus around 11 a.m. Eastern Time on Monday. "We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products," Stone tweeted at around noon Monday. "We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience." According to DownDetecter, thousands of users across the globe began reporting outages on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and Oculus around 11 a.m. Monday. Facebook, whose shares fell as much as 5% during Monday's trading session, did not immediately return FOX Business' request for comment on the cause of the outages.
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Post by Admin on Oct 10, 2021 21:45:11 GMT
A week that started for Facebook with a six-hour global outage and ended with one of its most trenchant critics, the American-Filipino journalist Maria Ressa, being awarded a Nobel prize. And in the middle of it, a whistleblower captured the attention of America.
“How is your PTSD?” I texted Chris Wylie, Cambridge Analytica’s former director of elections. Because three years ago, he was the whistleblower in the spotlight in the Observer’s investigations into Facebook.
Last week, it was the turn of Frances Haugen, a calm, articulate, authoritative voice from inside Facebook’s civic integrity department whose testimony has proved devastating to the company. She not only spoke compellingly about Facebook’s lies and deceptions, its harm to teenagers and devastating impact on democracy, she backed up her words with hard evidence – in eight complaints to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and documents handed to five attorney generals. Later this month, she will testify to the UK parliament.
If there’s one thing last week has proved, it’s that nothing beats a human face telling a human story. There was much of Haugen’s testimony that was already known or at least glimpsed. Every day for the last three years has brought a fresh tide of Facebook-so-toxic stories – they’ve just lost their ability to shock.
This is a tale of two testimonies: two testimonies that bookend the first chapter of the beginning of the end of Facebook. Because that’s what we are seeing, playing out, in slow motion: the Fall of the House of Zuck. It won’t happen today and it’s not going to happen tomorrow, but last week the cracks in its foundations became deepening crevasses. It is coming.
Wylie’s testimony in 2018 set the hares running. It precipitated numerous investigations into the company, investigations whose failure explains why, three years on, we are here again. Haugen testified to problems that are a direct result of a corrupt and corrosive internal corporate culture exposed then. Facebook’s executive suite should have been burned down three years ago. It wasn’t. In 2018, the mask came off. But the authorities failed to hold a single person to account. And we, and our increasingly fragile democracies and fraught teenagers, are living with the consequences. When the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fined Facebook a record $5bn (£3.6bn) for its part in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the only outcome was to send Facebook’s stock price even higher. After all, what’s $5bn to a company worth a trillion dollars?
But now Facebook is in trouble. It is facing many legal and regulatory challenges, all the while in a weakened and bloodied state with its workforce shaken and disturbed. Because its greatest point of failure, at the moment, is itself. One of the most striking differences between 2018 and now was how incredibly organised and supported Haugen has been. An entire industry now exists to welcome and support tech whistleblowers. More will surely come. Striking, too, was how expertly briefed and informed were the senators who questioned Haugen.
All this has happened in three years. But there’s more. There are existential threats to Facebook’s business model, not the least of which is the FTC’s suit to break the company up. State attorney generals, many with cases already proceeding, are scenting blood. A Texas lawsuit names Sandberg for possible market rigging.
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Post by Admin on Feb 4, 2022 19:30:16 GMT
Facebook, now Meta, has emerged as the fourth quarter’s biggest loser in the hotly contested advertising wars. Meta’s stock plummeted 26% Thursday after it revealed that it’s taking a big hit from Apple’s privacy changes, adding that it expects the feature to decrease the company’s 2022 revenue by about $10 billion. Facebook’s admission is the most concrete data point so far on the impact to the advertising industry of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature, which reduces targeting capabilities by limiting advertisers from accessing an iPhone user identifier. Meta lost more than $230 billion in value Thursday, which is the biggest one-day drop in value in the history of the U.S. stock market. Meta’s plunge, based on a weaker-than-expected revenue forecast, topped the prior record set by Apple, when it lost $182 billion in market value in September 2020.
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