close
Friday March 29, 2024

WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram face disruptions

By News Desk
October 05, 2021
WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram face disruptions

WASHINGTON: Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms were hit by a massive outage Monday, impacting potentially tens of millions of people as users flocked to other networks to sound off, tracking sites showed. Pakistan was the among countries impacted.

The outage followed allegations these platforms are used to spread hate, violence and misinformation, and that Facebook has tried to hide that evidence. Tracker Downdetector was showing outages in heavily populated areas in North America and parts of Europe, south Asia including Pakistan with problems being reported from around 1545 GMT. Downdetector showed there were more than 20,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority said that Facebook services had been affected internationally due to an outage. “Further details are being collected,” a spokesperson for the authority said. Users trying to access Facebook in affected areas were greeted with the message: “Something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”

“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said on Twitter. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologise for any inconvenience,” he said.

The outage comes a day after a whistleblower went on US television to reveal her identity after she leaked a trove of documents to authorities alleging the social media giant knew its products were fueling hate and harming children’s mental health, spread hate, violence and misinformation, and that Facebook has tried to hide that evidence.

Frances Haugen, a 37-year-old data scientist from Iowa, has worked for companies including Google and Pinterest — but said in an interview with CBS news show “60 Minutes” that Facebook was “substantially worse” than anything she had seen before. The world’s largest social media platform has been embroiled in a firestorm brought about by Haugen, with US lawmakers and The Wall Street Journal detailing how Facebook knew its products, including Instagram, were harming young girls, especially around body image.

Facebook has pushed back on those claims.

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.

“I think that finally now policymakers, maybe the White House, other leaders can look at someone like Frances Haugen and say... ‘It’s now incumbent upon us, Facebook will not fix itself,’” said Nora Benavidez, a Facebook accountability expert.

Facebook’s vice president of policy and global affairs Nick Clegg vehemently pushed back at the assertion its platforms are “toxic” for teens, days after a tense, hours-long congressional hearing in which US lawmakers grilled the company over its impact on the mental health of young users. Haugen, the whistleblower, is herself set to testify Tuesday on Capitol Hill over Facebook and Instagram’s impact on young people.

Senators put the social media giant’s Antigone Davis through the wringer last week over damning reports that Facebook’s own research warned of potential harm. Davis told lawmakers that a survey of teens on 12 serious issues like anxiety, sadness and eating disorders showed that Instagram was generally helpful to them.

Yet, Senator Richard Blumenthal read aloud excerpts from company documents he said were leaked to lawmakers by a Facebook whistleblower that directly contradicted her. “Substantial evidence suggests that experiences on Instagram and Facebook make body dissatisfaction worse,” he said, adding the finding was not a disgruntled worker’s complaint but company research. The enterprise has been under relentless pressure to guard against being a platform where misinformation, hate and child-harming content can spread.

Legislators have struggled to pass new rules that would update online protections in decades-old laws crafted long before social media even existed.