Facebook, what is going on?

    A lot has been going on at Facebook this week and none of it is good for them, but it could be for the rest of us. Between a data breach, the entire platform including Instagram and WhatsApp being down for 6 hours, and allegations brought by a whistleblower, there is certainly no shortage of interesting things to talk about.

    The most notable of these to most people is the fact that on Monday, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were offline for about six hours. The problem that caused this outage involved something called BGP. Essentially what happened is Facebook’s servers made a mistake so that when someone wanted to go to Facebook and their ISP tries to retrieve its location on the web, it returned an invalid location instead of pointing at the desired location that the user wished to visit. As always, conspiracy theories have abounded, however, it appears the issue was a simple mistake by a Facebook employee.

    The very next day, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen made an appearance before Senate to testify about the things that she learned about the company while working there on the civic-integrity team. Her testimony could be summarized by saying that Facebook’s products harm children and weaken democracy. Facebook has allegedly made numerous decisions that have prioritized money for Facebook over the good of the public. Along with this came a study of teenage girls that found that 1 in 3 teen girls thought that Instagram made them more unhappy about their bodies. Facebook has disputed these findings, but things aren’t looking good for the company. This isn’t the first time that Facebook has had issues with the law and regulation, but it will hopefully push lawmakers to finally do something.