What happens when Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp go down for a day? According to some data, traffic to other destinations on the open web jumped by 21%. Thats what an analysis conducted by Taboola of 9,000 digital publishers representing 500 million daily unique users shows.
When apps used by billions of people worldwide blinked out, lives were disrupted, businesses were cut off from customers — and some Facebook employees were locked out of their offices.
Security experts tracking the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp outages say they could have been triggered by a configuration error or could be the result of an internal mistake. An outside hack is viewed as less likely.
Exclusives
Brands take to Twitter to sound off after the world’s largest social network is thrown offline.
Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram Suffer Worldwide Outage
Facebook said late Monday that “the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change” and that there is “no evidence that user data was compromised as a result” of the outage. The company apologized and said it is working to understand more about the cause, which began around 11:40 a.m. ET Monday.
Lena Pietsch, director of policy communications for Facebook, fired back Sunday night (Oct. 3) against a segment of 60 Minutes revealing the identity of a company whistleblower as former product manager Frances Hougan. “On Sunday, CBS 60 Minutes ran a segment that used select company materials to tell a misleading story about the research we do to improve our products,” Pietsch said. “The segment also disregards the significant investments we make to keep people safe on our platform and seeks to impugn the motivations of our company.”
In an internal memo meant to preempt a 60 Minutes interview, Facebook defended itself and said that social media was not a primary cause of polarization.
The company faces accusations that it hid research showing the mental and emotional harm Instagram, its photo-sharing app, has had on teenagers.
Government regulation will never fix everything wrong with online discourse. The industry needs to develop professional norms—just as journalism once did.
Facebook today acknowledged that the performance of its ads has suffered as Apple has rolled out new privacy controls for iOS users, and it could be poised to get even worse as Facebook offsets it by charging higher prices and increasing the ad loads in its feeds.
Facebook took unfriendly fire from both sides of the aisle in a Senate Judiciary Committee Antitrust Subcommittee hearing on Big Data.
The survey found that “a sizable portion” of U.S. adults (48%) say they get news “sometimes” or “often” from social media sites.
As Apple and Google enact privacy changes, businesses are grappling with the fallout, Madison Avenue is fighting back and Facebook has cried foul.
The company has teamed up with Ray-Ban to create glasses that can take photos, record video, answer phone calls and play podcasts.
The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday unsealed a host of previously secret material involving Facebook, ranging from information about the company’s monthly users to details about prior acquisitions. Among other newly unsealed allegations, the FTC says more than 200 million people in the U.S. visited Facebook in every month of 2020, while more than 138 million in the country visited Instagram, according to Comscore data.
NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook has apologized for putting a “primates” label on a video of Black men, according to a report in the New York Times. The newspaper said the video […]
The social network has contacted academics to create a group to advise it on thorny election-related decisions, a move that would allow it to shift some of its political decision-making to an advisory body.
Last year, Facebook Inc. did something U.S. technology giants have done countless times before: It bought a smaller company and closed the deal without notifying competition regulators. But this transaction — the $400 million acquisition of image library Giphy Inc. — was particularly bold. At the time, Facebook was under investigation by antitrust enforcers for what the government says was an illegal practice of buying companies in order to eliminate them as potential threats to its monopoly power. Maneuvers like Giphy’s make policing deals all the more challenging at a time when authorities are being called on to take more aggressive steps to curb the growth of dominant companies, especially in the technology industry.
The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday filed a revised, and significantly lengthier, antitrust complaint against Facebook, in an attempt to persuade a federal judge to allow the prosecution to proceed. Facebook “unlawfully acquired innovative competitors with popular mobile features that succeeded where Facebook’s own offerings fell flat or fell apart,” the agency stated Thursday in a post summarizing its new complaint.
The Federal Trade Commission this week is expected to lay out its new legal strategy in an ongoing antitrust battle with Facebook that will also reveal how FTC chief Lina Khan plans to take on the market power of U.S. tech giants. The FTC has until Thursday to disclose whether it plans to proceed with the case after a major courtroom setback earlier this year. The agency is largely expected to move forward, and is likely to do so by filing an amended complaint.
Facebook has disabled the personal accounts of researchers at New York University who have been studying political ads on the social media platform. In addition, Facebook has shut down the pages associated with the research, and researchers’ access to the Facebook APIs needed to share Facebook data to other apps.
Facebook Profits Top $10B As Revenue Soars
Revenue jumped 56% to $28.58 billion from $18.32 billion. Analysts, on average, were expecting earnings of $3.04 per share and revenue of $24.85 billion, according to a poll by FactSet.
A federal judge eviscerated arguments by more than 40 state attorneys general that Facebook had a monopoly.
Without her vote, the case against Facebook could hit serious roadblocks, splitting the vote 2-2 between Democratic and Republican commissioners.
Trump announced the action against Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube, along with the companies’ CEOs, at a press conference in New Jersey on Wednesday. He was joined by other plaintiffs in the suits, which were filed in federal court in Miami.
A federal judge’s dismissal of the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Facebook is posing the first big test for President Biden’s new FTC Chair Lina Khan. But the renowned big tech critic faces a serious time crunch, with less than 30 days to try and shift the momentum through a revamped lawsuit.
A federal judge today dismissed the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Facebook, concluding that the government failed to establish that the tech platform had a monopoly on social media networks. The judge, James E. Boasberg, still left open the possibility that the government could revive the case by amending its complaint.
TVNewsCheck‘s Michael Depp talks with Brodie Fenlon, editor in chief of Canada’s CBC News, about the organization’s month-long suspension of comments on its stories posted on Facebook amid a climate of rising toxicity on social platforms.
The two-year suspension is effective from Jan. 7, so Trump has 18 months to go. Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, wrote in a blog post Friday: “At the end of this period, we will look to experts to assess whether the risk to public safety has receded. We will evaluate external factors, including instances of violence, restrictions on peaceful assembly and other markers of civil unrest.”
Facebook plans to announce today that it will no longer automatically give politicians a pass when they break the company’s hate speech rules, a major reversal after years of criticism that it was too deferential to powerful figures during the Trump presidency.
