did you guys see yesterday that a whistleblower came forward and said that facebook knows how to remove the conspiracy theories and nazis but chooses not to because of the ad revenue those kinds of things bring in (and actively turned off the bare minimum safeguards they had when biden won the election), and now today, immediately following this whistleblower’s report: facebook, instagram, whatsapp, and all the sites owned by facebook are mysteriously down and have been down for over two hours now
A good layman’s explanation of the technicalities is here on twitter: (twitter.com /alexhern/status/1445130867073032195?s=20. It doesn’t sound like a deliberate ploy, just deeply stupid and overconfident design. (Also I don’t think they’d dump 7 billion dollars of net worth for one day’s worth of trying to escape scrutiny - which completely backfired as now they’re under even more.)
The only thing that keeps me from cackling delightedly at FB’s misfortune is learning that WhatsApp, which they own, is apparently crucial for communications and business throughout many countries. A lot of people couldn’t reach their families today. :(
It could be a coincidence that FB&Co are down today – if it weren’t for the fact that FB employees couldn’t even get in their office building because their key cards didn’t work. That level of buggery smacks of angry hackers.
That’s what I mean by deeply stupid design, actually. They hooked *everything* to the same Facebook tech, from the doors and keycards to the servers to the tools used to fix the servers. Because it apparently never occurred them that their tech could be broken/unavailable. I’ve heard it explained by a couple different engineers now (including an inspired Jane Austen-metaphor version) and it sounds like a classic fuckup. But I expect there will be postmortem reports in a day or two and we’ll know for sure.
[ID: Tweets by Cullen @cullend Oct 4, 2021 “Lmao. Friend at Facebook confirmed they ended up bringing in a guy with an angle grinder to get access to the server cage. The funniest part was my first time having a meeting there I pointed out to my host (a VP) that none of the doors have keyholes so what happens if that system goes down. He laughed it off saying ‘oh I’m sure we pay someone to think of that’ - apparently not”]