[ad_1]
Facebook has had a nightmarish week. It started with revelations the social media giant put out “profits before people”—Something Facebook vehemently deny. Then, all of a sudden, on Monday, all Facebook services (Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram) crashed due to a misconfiguration.
Facebook’s reputation nightmare worsened at the end of the week, with another breakdown affecting some users on Friday.
The Facebook outage on Monday sparked outrage: in some countries the digital economy has been effectively wiped out because its services are an integral part of communicating with employees, friends and family. Other services related to Facebook were also not working, such as Connect with Facebook.
The Facebook outage also resulted in several plots including speculation that the social network had been hit by a cyberattack, compounded when a seemingly new mine of Facebook details emerged on a dark web forum.
What caused Facebook to crash?
In this case, the timing of the outage was a coincidence: Facebook was not hacked, because ForbesDavey Winder explains on this week’s Straight Talking Cyber: “Basically, Facebook has updated a configuration file that tells its routers how to communicate with the Internet, something called BGP (border gateway protocol). They made an error in the config file, and that error propagated and affected their DNS.
“Normally they would fix that config file, send it, then propagate and say, ‘hello actually, we still exist’. Internet would connect again and everything would be fine.
But the problem was Facebook’s built-in ecosystem – which is why WhatsApp and Instagram also fell – because everything relies on Facebook’s infrastructure, including its security. “People who would need to edit and fix the config file could not authenticate because Facebook was down,” says Winder.
The Guardian’s Alex Hearn also eloquently explained the Facebook outage via a Tweeter.
The problem shows how finely balanced the technical infrastructure is, says Sean Wright, head of SME security at Immersive Labs. “One-off changes can create huge problems, which have a significant financial impact and reputation.”
He also highlighted what happens when businesses rely on certain controls and technologies. “Not only was the service down, Facebook employees were unable to access the servers to rectify the problem quickly,” adds Wright.
Facebook’s comedy of mistakes
It was a comedy of mistakes for Facebook, and the start of the week had been far from funny for the social network. A whistleblower gave explosive testimony about how Facebook and its sister site Instagram are harming users, a fact that would already be known to Facebook itself because he had done the research.
All the dialogue on Facebook this week has been entirely negative and as a result it has been an incredibly expensive week for the social network. Facebook’s share price has fallen. Advertising activity is going badly for the social network too. Being offline for five hours on Monday left many businesses unable to operate and resulted in further loss of revenue for its advertisers.
“It hasn’t been a good week for Facebook’s reputation, which has potentially weakened user confidence in the platform,” said Jake Moore, cybersecurity specialist at ESET. “The proposed competition is already progressing with the younger generations,” he explains.
Apple’s new privacy features also hit Facebook hard. The company admitted in a recent blog post that it was no longer able to accurately measure advertising campaigns without the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), which Apple users are increasingly blocking as part of the new App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature.
Facebook users are more privacy-conscious than ever
Yet people are increasingly aware of their privacy and Facebook’s data-hungry habits. Some people are already deleting their accounts, although on paper the number of Facebook users is not decreasing. This nightmare week and the Facebook blackouts could also have caused many to realize that in reality, they are okay without Facebook and Instagram in their lives.
WhatsApp competitor Telegram said it added 70 million users when WhatsApp was down, and Twitter was certainly busier as Facebook users searched for another place to go.
After such a nightmarish week for Facebook, should you delete your account? It’s hard to know what to do when using it to communicate with your friends and family, but maybe do what I’m doing: just use Facebook on your browser, rather than an app that goes with you everywhere, and lock down -la via the privacy settings. Use tools like Apple’s ATT feature to block some of the tracking and try to spend less time on the social media site.
Facebook responds
Facebook denies putting profits before people, saying:
“The growth in the number of people or advertisers using Facebook means nothing if our services are not used in a way that brings people together. This is why we invest so much in safety that it has an impact on our bottom line. Protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits. Saying we turn a blind eye to the comments ignores those investments, including the 40,000 people working on safety and security at Facebook and our $ 13 billion investment since 2016. ”
Facebook responded to the claim that internal research shows the company is not doing enough to stamp out harmful content on the platform, saying:
“We have invested heavily in people and technology to keep our platform secure, and have made tackling disinformation and providing authoritative information a priority. If research had identified an exact solution to these complex challenges, the tech industry, governments, and society would have solved them long ago. We have a solid track record of using our research, as well as external research and working closely with experts and organizations, to inform changes to our applications.
Facebook also denied that its platform was toxic to teens, saying:
“Research has actually shown that many teens we have heard from feel that using Instagram helps them when they are dealing with the kind of difficult times and issues that teens have always faced. This research, like external research on these questions, has found that teens report having both positive and negative experiences with social media. “
[ad_2]
Source link