After more than six hours of outage Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are once again accessible.
This is the longest outage the tech giant's services have experienced since 2008 when a bug knocked its server offline for one whole day, affecting Facebook's then 80 million users.
The outage comes one day after the whistleblower who leaked private internal research to both The Wall Street Journal and Congress revealed herself ahead of an interview with "60 Minutes." The documents, first reported in a series of Journal stories, revealed that the company's executives understood the negative impacts of Instagram among younger users and that Facebook's algorithm enabled the spread of misinformation, among other things.
The Whistleblower is due to appear before the US Congress on Tuesday (today) in the second part of a hearing that commenced on September 30 to investigate the allegations.
"To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry," Facebook said in a statement after most of the services were restored, without disclosing what went wrong. "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."
Facebook has been experiencing a lot of pressure to address some of its platform's ills in response to the Wall Street Journal five-part series that exposed details of an internal investigation that highlighted negative impacts of the company's services to young users. One of the articles reported that, according to Facebook’s findings, one in three teenagers said Instagram made his or her body image issues worse. Among teenagers who had suicidal thoughts, 13 percent of British users and 6 percent of American users said they could trace those thoughts to Instagram.
The company faces regulatory accusations that it hid research showing the mental and emotional harm that Instagram, its photo-sharing app, has on teenagers.
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Shares in the social media giant had plummeted earlier on Sunday after the whistleblower revealed herself for the first time and a cussed the company of putting profit over the safety of its users, especially teenage girls on Instagram.
Facebook’s shares fell by as much as 4.5 per cent on Monday morning in New York, hitting $327.66, their lowest level since June 21
The revelations have ignited a firestorm for Facebook in Washington as politicians accuse the company of covering up internal research about its negative effects.
Leaders of the Stop Hate For Profit advertising boycott campaign are also considering a new wave of actions against the company. Their last campaign in 2020 saw four civil rights and advocacy groups coming together to launch the campaign, which saw over 1,000 advertisers pull Facebook and Instagram ads temporarily, mostly for about a month. The groups that organized the campaign were Common Sense, a children's online safety group; The Anti-Defamation League; Color for Change; NAACP; Free Press; and Sleeping Giants, an advertising accountability group.
On September 30, in the first hearing, members of the US Senate’s consumer protection subcommittee admonished Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, for withholding internal information about how its services hurt young people and for not significantly changing those services to reduce those downsides. Senators accused the company of knowing for years that Instagram, its photo-sharing app, has caused mental and emotional harm.
“It has hidden its own research on addiction and the toxic effects of its products,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, the chairman of the subcommittee and a Democrat from Connecticut. “It has attempted to deceive the public and us in Congress about what it knows, and it has weaponized childhood vulnerabilities against children themselves. It’s chosen growth over children’s mental health and well-being, greed over preventing the suffering of children.”
Lawmakers called for regulations to rein in Facebook, saying repeated scandals involving safety, data privacy abuses and misinformation have created a trust deficit.
“You’ve lost trust, and we do not trust you with influencing our children,” said Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, the ranking Republican on the subcommittee.
The hearings were called after The Wall Street Journal published a series of articles this month about internal research at Facebook.
All three platforms stopped working shortly before noon ET, when the websites and apps for Facebook's services were responding with server errors. Reports on DownDetector.com showed the outages appeared to be widespread, but it was unclear how many users were unable to access the apps.
ThousandEyes, a network monitoring service owned by Cisco, said in an email that the outage was the result of DNS failure. DNS, short for Domain Name System, is like a phone book for websites.
Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's chief technology officer, apologized in a statement posted to Twitter.
"Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now," Schroepfer wrote. "We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible."
In 2019, a similar outage lasted about an hour. Facebook blamed a server configuration change for that outage.
