Facebook, Instagram sites crash after whistleblower details company prioritizes profit over safety

[zz/STRF/STAR MAX/IPx image]

UPDATED, Monday 6:30 p.m.: Less than a day after a report aired on “60 Minutes” from a whistleblower detailed company practices that prioritized profits over safety, both Facebook and Instagram went down for six hours.

Users began running into issues accessing both of the social media giant’s websites just before noon on Monday. The company’s What’s App and other Facebook-related products also experienced issues.

There is no word yet on what caused Facebook’s servers to go offline, kicking all of its platforms off the Internet with error messages or frozen screens popping up.

In a statement, Facebook said “to everyone affected by the outages on our platforms today, we’re sorry. We appreciate your patience as we come back online.”

The problem appeared to be more widespread than just a simple server outage.

Francis Haugen, a former data scientist at Facebook, kept her identity a secret when she filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission against Facebook and shared internal Facebook documents with The Wall Street Journal.

Last night, Haugen was revealed as the whistleblower during a report on “60 Minutes” and Haugen said she’ll testify to congress that Facebook has deceived regulators and the public about its monitoring of hate speech and misinformation.

She said on “60 Minutes” that Facebook “is choosing profit over safety.

Haugen is a native of Iowa City, Radio Iowa reported Monday, and her website says her parents are professors. Haugen has an electrical and computer engineering degree from Olin College and a Harvard MBA. She worked at Google and Yelp before she was hired at Facebook in 2019. She resigned from Facebook in May of this year.

A spokesman for Facebook told CNN the social media platform reflects the good, the bad and the ugly of humanity and Facebook is trying to mitigate the bad and amplify the good.

Users have since taken to Twitter since the other platforms went down:

.
About Sam Walker 1512 Articles
Sam Walker was news director for OBXToday.com, Beach 104, 99.1 The Sound, Big 94.5 WCMS and Z 92.3 from August 2011 to March 2022.