Facebook grappled with challenges on two fronts on
Wednesday: an hours-long outage and intensified scrutiny from
investigators reportedly probing data deals struck by the world’s
largest social network.
As the outage continued, gripes flooded rival Twitter as well as a
comments section on downdetector.com, which tracks trouble accessing
online pages.
“I have never seen Facebook down this long,” one user lamented. “And many other sites and apps are having issues too.”
A downdetector.com map late on Wednesday showed
Facebook
service troubles persisting in parts of Australia, Asia, Europe, South
America and North America.
“11 hours and still global wide outage continues,” read another comment.
“This is very bad. Seriously this is not something funny or worth the amusement to even troll about.”
Some media outlets branded the outage as the biggest in Facebook’s history.
The outage, of unknown origin, also affected Facebook-owned Instagram, as well as Messenger.
In some cases the apps could be accessed but would not load posts or handle missives.
‘Not a DDoS attack’
The California firm, which has more than 2-billion users,
acknowledged the outage after users noted on Twitter that they could not
access Facebook or had limited functionality.
“We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing
the Facebook family of apps. We”re working to resolve the issue as soon
as possible,” a Facebook statement said on Twitter.
A short time later, Facebook indicated the outage was not related to an attack aimed at overwhelming the network.
‘We’re focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible,
but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS [distributed
denial of service] attack,” Facebook said.
Distributed denial of service strikes involve hackers overwhelming
websites with tidal waves of simultaneous requests, typically using
armies or computers infected with malicious code.
The social network said there was no update of the situation as evening arrived in California.
In November 2018, a Facebook outage was attributed to a server
problem, and a September disruption was said to be the result of
“networking issues”.
Grand jury subpoena
While the outage continued, The New York Times reported that US
prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation into the social
network’s practice of sharing users’ data with companies without letting
its members know.
A grand jury in New York has subpoenaed information from at least two
major smartphone makers about such arrangements with Facebook,
according to the Times.
Regulators, investigators and elected officials in the US and
elsewhere in the world have already been digging into Facebook’s
data-sharing practices.
The social network’s handling of user data has been a flashpoint for
controversy since it admitted in 2018 that Cambridge Analytica, a
political consultancy that did work for Donald Trump’s 2016 election
campaign, used an app that may have hijacked the private details of
87-million users.
“It has already been reported that there are ongoing federal
investigations, including by the department of justice,” a Facebook
spokesperson said in response to an AFP inquiry.
“As we’ve said before, we are co-operating with investigators and
take those probes seriously. We’ve provided public testimony, answered
questions, and pledged that we will continue to do so.”
Facebook has shared limited amounts of user data with smartphone
makers and other outside partners to enable its services to work well on
devices or with applications. Regulators, and now prosecutors, appear
intent on determining whether this was done in ways that let users know
what was happening and protected privacy.
The social network has announced a series of moves to tighten
handling of data, including eliminating most of its data-sharing
partnerships with outside companies.
The focus of the grand jury probe was not clear, nor was when it started, according to the Times, which cited unnamed sources.
- AFP
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