Facebook outage is dry for the worst web outages

NEW YORK, October 4 (Reuters Breakingviews) – Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t been able to take a break lately. The Facebook boss (FB.O) wants to turn the two-dimensional internet into a metaverse where “instead of just viewing content, you are there,” according to an interview with The Verge. But in the wake of an exposure of some uncomfortable internal documents provided by a whistleblower who is about to appear before the U.S. Congress, his entire business has been extinguished on two-dimensional screens.

Social networks Facebook and Instagram, as well as the WhatsApp messaging service, were blocked for hours on Monday. It’s easy to dismiss the $ 920 billion company’s ad-supported outlets as vehicles for cat photos and selfies. But many people, including government officials, rely on WhatsApp as their primary means of communication. And Facebook is the primary vehicle for some businesses to reach their customers. The failure is therefore significant.

It raises all kinds of questions, like how – according to the Krebs on Security website – someone inside Facebook deleted key data that helps computers find business destinations online. It also highlights the lightly regulated functioning of the Internet.

It is a factor in the rapid development of the Web and its increasing utility in fields ranging from messaging to finance to home automation. But it’s also what prompted Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, to provide documents to the Wall Street Journal and speak at a Senate hearing scheduled for Tuesday. She will call on lawmakers to regulate Facebook in part because the pressures on social media like Instagram can hurt teenage girls a lot. Read more

Facebook’s downtime raises the question of whether it and other internet giants are big enough to be regulated more like utilities. Just as some banks are considered to be systemically important, perhaps some of what Facebook, Alphabet-owned Google (GOOGL.O) and cloud service giants Amazon.com (AMZN.O) are doing and Microsoft (MSFT.O) have become essential to the functioning of the economy. Meanwhile, lawmakers are also wondering if their activities may be anti-competitive.

For many people, a day or two on Facebook isn’t a big deal. But a similar outage at a massive cloud service provider could cause widespread problems, as smaller outages have shown before. The Internet is a mishmash of best efforts, often for-profit services. Some of them may now be too crucial to fail. Read more

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NEWS CONTEXT

– Facebook and Instagram appeared to be partially reconnected to the global internet on the evening of October 4, nearly six hours after a blackout that crippled the social media platform. Facebook and its WhatsApp and Instagram apps shut down around noon EST in the United States.

– The blackout was the second blow to the social media giant in as many days after a whistleblower on October 3 accused the company of repeatedly prioritizing profit over cracking down on hate speech and disinformation.

– The whistleblower, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, will urge the US Congress on October 5 to regulate her former employer, whom she plans to compare to tobacco companies who have denied for decades that smoking is harmful to health, according to prepared testimony seen by Reuters. She will testify at a hearing entitled “Protecting Kids Online: Testimony of a Facebook whistleblower”.

Editing by Antony Currie and Katrina Hamlin