Facebook Suffers Massive Outage After Whistleblower Speaks to 60 Minutes

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were all down on Monday for a significant part of the day after the social media giant suffered its worst outage since 2008.

All three were down more than six hours after users first reported a major outage that took the services offline Monday. The platforms stopped working shortly before noon ET.

“To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry,” Facebook said in a statement. “We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.”
Facebook did not disclose what went wrong.

ThousandEyes, a network monitoring service owned by Cisco, said in an email to CNBC that the outage was the result of DNS failure. DNS, short for Domain Name System, is like a phone book for websites.

Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technology officer, tweeted, “Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now,” Schroepfer wrote. “We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”

The outage conveniently came after whisteblower Frances Haugen made an appearance on 60 Minutes on Sunday to discuss that the company is misleading the public on progress against hate speech, violence, misinformation.

Haugen, who was recruited by Facebook in 2019, told the show that she agreed to take the job only if she could work against misinformation because she had lost a friend to online conspiracy theories.

“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,” said Haugen.

It was in September that Haugen’s lawyers filed at least 8 complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission which enforces the law in financial markets. The complaints compare the internal research with the company’s public face.

Facebook responded to 60 Minutes and said that “every day our teams have to balance protecting the right of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place. We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content. To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true.”

Facebook shares closed down almost 5% on the day.

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.