Facebook Outage Rekindles Push for a Free and Open Web
Facebook, Workplace, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down today for roughly six hours due to a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) configuration error. Cloudflare describes BGP as “the postal service of the Internet.” It is responsible for routing Facebook’s traffic and making all of its domains accessible to visitors. https://twitter.com/briankrebs/status/1445081561536339970 At first glance, the outage appeared to be a malicious attack following a Facebook whistleblower’s revelations on 60 Minutes Sunday evening. BGP routing can be hijacked, but so far there is no evidence to suggest that it’s anything other than an ill-timed configuration error. “The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook, and Facebook over and over again chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money,” former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen told 60 Minutes. Haugen copied tens of thousands of documents of internal research before leaving, one which stated: “We have evidence from a variety of sources that hate speech, divisive political speech and misinformation on Facebook and the family of apps are affecting societies around the world.” Haugen’s interview with 60 Minutes had already made Facebook’s…
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