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Later Monday, Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s VP of infrastructure, released a statement saying the company was “sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms.”
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“We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. “To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry,” it said. That’s what happened in June to Fastly, a US cloud computing firm, which experienced a global internet outage for about 50 minutes.īut the fact that a company of Facebook’s size and resources was offline for around six hours suggests there was no quick fix for the issue.įacebook tweeted just after 6:30 pm ET that its apps and services were beginning to work again. “I don’t know If I’ve seen an outage like this before from a major internet firm,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at network monitoring firm Kentik.įor a lot of people, Madory told CNN, “Facebook is the internet to them.”įirms sometimes lose internet connectivity when they update their network configurations, Madory said. The fact that Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp all experienced significant issues for around six hours was a major event for many users. In her prepared testimony obtained by CNN on Monday ahead of her appearance before the subcommittee, Haugen said, “I came forward because I recognized a frightening truth: almost no one outside of Facebook knows what happens inside Facebook.”Ĭoncerning the outage, Facebook VP of infrastructure Santosh Janardhan said in a statement Tuesday morning that it wanted to “make clear” there was “no malicious activity,” Haugen is set to testify before the Senate subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security on Tuesday.
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The interview followed weeks of reporting about and criticism of Facebook after Haugen released thousands of pages of internal documents to regulators and the Wall Street Journal.
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Facebook has pushed back on those claims. On Sunday, “60 Minutes” aired a segment in which Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen claimed the company is aware of how its platforms are used to spread hate, violence and misinformation, and that Facebook has tried to hide that evidence. Instagram promoted pages glorifying eating disorders to teen accounts
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