Facebook and the other apps the company owns were down for over five hours on October 4.
With more than 3.5 billion users on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, the outage affected many businesses and communicators. Facebook accounts are also used to link people to accounts they may have with other sites, causing issues on even more platforms.
On the evening of the first outage, Facebook claimed that the issue was caused by updates to their infrastructure. Facebook experienced another hours long outage caused by the same issues on Oct. 8 around 3 p.m.
Coincidentally, Frances Haugen, a former manager at Facebook, had recently called attention to issues within the infrastructure before the outages occurred. She raised these concerns through her personal website and during interviews with major media outlets.
While working with Facebook, Haugen worked with misinformation issues and kept many documents. On her website she has said that she does not want to destroy Facebook, but improve it.
There was a hearing in front of the Senate on Tuesday where Haugen provided a look into Facebook’s inner workings.
Haugen proposed raising the minimum age to use social media to 17 in order to protect teenagers from the harms of social media. She also discussed how the algorithms work and asked for more research to be done on the structural building blocks of platforms like Facebook.
Headline Photo: Facebook announced that the outages on both Monday, October 4th and Friday, October 8th were caused by adjustments to their infrastructure. Photo by USA Today