Facebook is back online, but the company continues to face allegations of misconduct | DW News

facebook is back online after a major outage that also affected instagram and whatsapp services were gradually restored after around six hours of disruption now facebook apps and messaging platforms were down around the globe impacting businesses available via facebook logins the company has apologized and says it doesn't believe its systems were hacked or that any user data was compromised now after services were restored engineers at facebook put out a statement where they said that the outage was caused by configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinates network traffic between data centers now this disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way data centers communicate bringing our services to a halt you can tell that was written by an engineer but now joining me at the business desk is stephen uh beasley hey steve good to see you so i mean this outage affected a number of businesses just talk to us about how facebook is so important how it's an integral part of services for many companies yeah christine for most big companies it's not critical infrastructure facebook doesn't host websites although it does provide key portals for um customers to get through to see advertisements to click through and get purchases that's not nothing but their websites remained up for smaller businesses that might be a different story though especially if we look at places like india africa india in particular for whatsapp that's its biggest country in terms of user numbers 400 million users for whatsapp and we do see a lot of business coordination with that platform whether it's employees communicating with one another whether it's building community groups around products and brands um and also we're seeing more efforts to actually drive sales through whatsapp itself and so that would mean that for example facebook has recently taken stake in an e-commerce platform in india and together they've been developing actually a platform through which you can order something on whatsapp and then you can track that order through whatsapp so if the app goes down in that case a lot of small merchandisers in india could potentially lose out at that time um but again it just depends on how long of an outage it is but it does show the reliance right and and what does this mean for facebook yeah i mean obviously this is not something that you want to happen um you know this is um you know we know that they looked at this and they saw it as a critical issue for their reputation obviously you don't want your main service to go down all three services in fact you want people to stay there and to watch the site to stay on the site and it shows that they need to have some redundancies in their systems i mean people couldn't even get into their doors and their offices and facebook it shows how everything flows through their own system that's an issue but ultimately stoppages happen you know outages happen in the internet world including major host sites that host actually big internet sites i would say you know what's interesting what i found interesting was how many people were going on platforms other platforms to joke about the relief from being off of facebook properties for a while and that sort of points to one of the bigger concerns for facebook and that is that audience growth is falling in some of its key markets the u.s and eu it's flattening out those are the markets where it earns big revenue so while it's growing in places like asia india things like that they're not really making their money there so they need to make sure that they're getting the excitement still and what we're seeing more is a kind of exasperation with it so that's maybe why we're seeing things like trying to tap into new younger markets like things with instagram for kids this controversial idea that's now been shut down so i think that's actually going to be their bigger challenge and i think we see a big a a peak into that challenge with what happened yesterday well interesting times uh and stephen thanks so much for that that stephen beasley from dw business and for more on this i'm joined by david lum in los angeles he is the mobile editor at techgrader it's an online publication uh that is focused on technology it's good to have you on the program david tell us what more do we know now about this outage well not much more than we knew a few hours ago facebook hasn't given any official comment about what happened nor has it released this information and it's online portals on twitter on instagram anything else so we really just have the reporting to tell us what happened uh david um a lot of people of course if you went online i saw on my twitter we're making fun of this right i was certainly relieved to get a break from some of those instagram influencers but but this is this has some real serious implications for a lot of businesses just tell us about how integral facebook's platforms are for for many businesses around the world well i know when we think of businesses we think of websites but a lot of businesses don't have those portals or they're trying to reach other people on other platforms so they'll have a storefront on instagram they'll communicate with their customers on instagram on whatsapp on facebook messenger so this really probably was a big blow to small businesses and that's tough especially in this economy and what about whatsapp um i know that for a lot of people whatsapp is really the the main or the primary source of communication yeah we definitely saw a lot of people lamenting that whatsapp was down especially to break communication with families across countries across continents so it was kind of terrible to see that one outage in a social network then sort of dominate effect that uh people couldn't contact each other and really kind of brought to light how much we depend on all of these systems in one company you you are alluding to the fact that we are so dependent on this tech giant perhaps talk to us a little bit more about that and and perhaps the fragility of the internet which is something that we don't often think about definitely um and this might not have happened for one particular company or one particular service but it was all these services and all these companies or this company facebook having all these companies so it's kind of an argument against this sort of uh consolidation of all these things the acquisition of all these networks that we have communication business all these things that we now are routed through in this case one internet network technology and when that broke it broke bad for in this case over six hours right does it perhaps surprise you that that facebook hasn't taken adequate action in addressing these allegations no no i think that's kind of par for the course for facebook where they will have a sort of apology when these this happens promise more action and then not have a sort of plan to get in case or really wait till the fire to die down so i think we're we're seeing some actual you know behind the scenes that we haven't had before whereas we just got apologies here in europe uh david uh lawmakers have have made attempts to sort of curb um you know the influence of tech giants is that something that you see lawmakers uh in the us doing anytime soon uh based on precedent i wouldn't expect it but uh we do have some lawmakers trying to put together legislation to protect uh children especially 16 and unders especially from manipulation and and maybe their their intentions are great but generally when facebook has visited capitol hill it's been met with misunderstanding and general a lack of savviness um that has led to a sort of soft pushback much softer than what we see in the eu so i expect uh if congress does anything it might follow the eu in pushing for a harder regulation okay thank you that's david mobile editor at techradar talking to us from la there thanks david thank you

Channel: DW News

Views: 45,894

Keywords: DW News, facebook outage, facebook, facebook leak, facebook charges, facebook misconduct, instagram, whatsapp, facebook down, instagram down, whatsapp down

Id: jeSvRwWNTns

Length: 7min 55sec (475 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021