Facebook’s Facing Problems

Facebook has been in the news frequently over the past few weeks, and not for good reason. 

It started on Sept. 30, during a Senate hearing when Sen. Richard Blumenthal questioned Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, regarding the negative impact Instagram has on children, specifically young girls. 

“[Facebook] has hidden its own research on addiction and the toxic effects of its products,” Blumenthal said. “It has attempted to deceive the public, and us in Congress, about what it knows, and it has weaponized childhood vulnerabilities against children themselves.” 

Facebook’s problems grew on Oct. 3, when former Facebook product manager, Frances Haugen, appeared on “60 Minutes” where she claimed the company is aware of how its platforms spread hate, violence, and misinformation. 

Since the interview, Facebook has pushed back against Haugen’s claims, with the Director of Policy Communications, Lena Pietsch, as the main spokesperson. 

“[Haugen] worked for the company for less than two years, has no direct reports, and never attended a decision-point meeting with C-level executives,” Pietsch said. 

On Tuesday, Oct. 5, Haugen spoke before a Senate committee to elaborate on her comments.

“[Facebook’s products] harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy,” Haugen said. “[They] put profit over moral responsibility.” 

Despite her criticisms, Haugen said she was hopeful regarding the future of Facebook.

“These problems are solvable,” Haugen said. “Facebook can change, but is clearly not going to do so on its own.” 

 On Monday, Oct. 4, not even twenty-four hours after Haugen’s “60 Minutes” interview, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp all experienced an outage. 

The outage lasted for about six hours, barring everyone from using the three social media companies, all owned by Facebook. 

Instagram and WhatsApp, while accessible, were not able to load any new content or send any messages. Facebook’s site would not load at all. 

According to NPR, Facebook was updating their router configuration, when the process went wrong, disturbed the system and shut down Facebook and all its subsidiaries. 

The Epoch Times said Domain Name System and Border Gateway Protocol problems caused the shutdown.

The DNS translates domain names to IP addresses so people can easily locate websites and other services over the internet. 

NPR said the BGP is comparable to a GPS system or a postal service within the internet. 

“Similar to ideas like map coordinates or ZIP codes, the system tells the rest of the world where to route traffic and information,” NPR said. “When a company can’t use the gateway protocol, it’s as if their online domains simply don’t exist.” 

Kevin Beaumont, former head of security operations at Microsoft, said that Facebook did this to themselves. 

“By not having BGP announcements for your DNS name servers, DNS falls apart and nobody can find you on the internet,” Beaumont said. “Facebook have basically de-platformed themselves from their own platform.” 

This social media blackout did not just have consequences for people who like to post pictures to share with others, but also for companies who rely on these outlets to conduct business. 

Since the shutdown lasted six hours, many companies lost a day of work, which affected sales via online stores as well as customer service. 

Adrienne LaFrance, a reporter for The Atlantic, said the economic problems with the outage go even deeper than businesses becoming less productive. 

“A huge portion of the digital-ad economy flows into Facebook,” LaFrance said. “It runs on getting people’s attention, and ordinarily makes a windfall doing so.” 

LaFrance also said the loss of WhatsApp was arguably the most disruptive of the apps that went down on Monday.

“WhatsApp is the primary form of remote communication for people all over the world,” LaFrance said. “Taking away people’s WhatsApp is like taking away billions of people’s telephones.” 

Despite the allegations being placed against the social media giant, Facebook said in a statement on Monday that the outage was not a result of a hack. 

“We want to make clear at this time that we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change,” Facebook’s statement read. The reputation of Facebook wasn’t the only thing to have suffered over the past week, as the six-hour outage also cost the company tens of millions of dollars according to NPR.