Tag Archives: Facebook

Facebook’s outage likely cost the company over $60 million

Getty Images reader comments 52 with 38 posters participating Share this story In a major outage yesterday, Facebook, along with its sibling sites, WhatsApp and Instagram, became unreachable for hours. Real-time website status tracker DownDetector received over 14 million reports from users who couldn’t use the social media giant’s apps and services. But beyond the obvious… Read More »

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus are down. Here’s what we know [Updated]

Enlarge / Today’s global Facebook and Facebook-owned-services outage appears to be the result of a flubbed BGP configuration change pushed by a Facebook engineer this morning. reader comments 369 with 218 posters participating, including story author Share this story Original story 1:26 pm EDT: Facebook—and apparently all the major services Facebook owns—are down today. We… Read More »

WhatsApp “end-to-end encrypted” messages aren’t that private after all

Enlarge / The security of Facebook’s popular messaging app leaves several rather important devils in its details. reader comments 88 with 64 posters participating, including story author Share this story Yesterday, independent newsroom ProPublica published a detailed piece examining the popular WhatsApp messaging platform’s privacy claims. The service famously offers “end-to-end encryption,” which most users interpret… Read More »

Amazon bought Facebook’s satellite team to help build its Starlink competitor

Enlarge / Image released by Amazon when it announced a deal with United Launch Alliance to use launch vehicles for Project Kuiper. reader comments 11 with 10 posters participating Share this story Facebook has sold its small-satellite Internet division to Amazon and said that it has no plans to become an Internet service provider. Amazon and… Read More »

Facebook shuts down hackers who infected iOS and Android devices

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Facebook said it has disrupted a hacking operation that used the social media platform to spread iOS and Android malware that spied on Uyghur people from the Xinjiang region of China. Malware for both mobile OSes had advanced capabilities that could steal just about anything stored on an infected device. The… Read More »

Facebook says hackers backed by Vietnam’s government are linked to IT firm

reader comments 10 with 10 posters participating Share this story Facebook said it has linked an advanced hacking group widely believed to be sponsored by the government of Vietnam to what’s purported to be a legitimate IT company in that country. The so-called advanced persistent threat group goes under the monikers APT32 and OceanLotus. It… Read More »

Study shows which messengers leak your data, drain your battery, and more

reader comments 62 with 43 posters participating Share this story Link previews are a ubiquitous feature found in just about every chat and messaging app, and with good reason. They make online conversations easier by providing images and text associated with the file that’s being linked. Unfortunately, they can also leak our sensitive data, consume… Read More »

Facebook bans Holocaust denial amid rapid rise in “deceptive” content

Enlarge / Facebook’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters as seen in 2017. reader comments 128 with 74 posters participating Share this story Facebook today is, once again, theoretically ramping up enforcement against hate speech, this time with a new policy prohibiting Holocaust denial on the platform. The change is due to a “well-documented rise in anti-Semitism… Read More »