Life without Facebook? Social network outage triggers moans and soul searching

Facebook grappled Thursdaywith a widespread outage, forcing millions of people to taste life without theworld’s largest social media platform.

It was probably the last thing Facebook neededas it stumbles from problem to problem, including outrage over its use ofcustomers’ private data.

   

The outage began Wednesday afternoon andtriggered a flood of gripes on downdetector.Com, which tracks trouble accessingonline pages, and on rival Twitter.

A Downdetector map late Wednesday showedFacebook service troubles persisting in parts of Australia, Asia, Europe, SouthAmerica and North America.

As of early Thursday the problem remained inparts of Europe and Asia, although moaning from America and else where keptcoming.

“You guys should look in the mirror atyourselves and hear how you sound,” a person with the handle Johanna wroteon Downdetector around 0745 GMT.

“You make it sound as if it’s the end ofthe world just because you can’t be on Facebook. Lmfao. Get a real life insteadof a digital one!?!?!?” Another whose handle is Palmina D’Allesandro musedthat time without Mark Zuckerberg’s baby might have been good for making thereal, human kind. “Up and running here…..For now…..But I predict ababy boom in 9 months, Remember that day FB went down and people were forced tonotice each other?”, this person wrote.

Some media outlets branded the outage as thebiggest in Facebook’s history.

The outage, of unknown origin, also affectedFacebook-owned Instagram, as well as Messenger, although Instagram later saidit was back up.

In some cases the apps could be accessed butwould not load posts or handle missives.

 The California firm which has more thantwo billion users acknowledged the outage after users noted on Twitter theycould not access Facebook or had limited functionality.

“We’re aware that some people arecurrently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re workingto resolve the issue as soon as possible,” a Facebook statement said onTwitter. A short time later, Facebook indicated the outage was not related toan attack aimed at overwhelming the network.

“We’re focused on working to resolve theissue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to aDDoS attack,” Facebook said. Distributed denial of service cyber strikesinvolve hackers overwhelming websites with tidal waves of simultaneousrequests, typically using armies of computers infected with malicious code.

The social network said there was no update ofthe situation as evening arrived in California. Last November, a Facebookoutage was attributed to a server problem, and a September disruption was saidto be the result of “networking issues.” 

While the outage continued, The New York Timesreported that US prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation into thesocial network’s practice of sharing users’ data with companies without lettingthem know. A grand jury in New York has subpoenaed information from at leasttwo major smartphone makers about such arrangements with Facebook, according tothe Times.

Regulators, investigators and electedofficials in the US and elsewhere in the world have already been digging intothe data sharing practices of Facebook.

The social network’s handling of user data hasbeen a flashpoint for controversy since it admitted last year that CambridgeAnalytica, a political consultancy which did work for Donald Trump’s 2016election campaign, used an app that may have hijacked the private details of 87million users.

“It has already been reported that thereare ongoing federal investigations, including by the Department ofJustice,” a Facebook spokesman said in response to an AFP inquiry.

“As we’ve said before, we are cooperatingwith investigators and take those probes seriously. We’ve provided publictestimony, answered questions, and pledged that we will continue to doso.” Facebook has shared limited amounts of user data with smartphonemakers and other outside partners to enable its services to work well ondevices or with applications.

Regulators, and now prosecutors, appear intenton determining whether this was done in ways that let users know what washappening and protected privacy.

The social network has announced a series ofmoves to tighten handling of data, including eliminating most of itsdata-sharing partnerships with outside companies.

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