The server was down for 6 hours, and the São Paulo Consumer Association in Brazil issued a ticket to Facebook

According to the compilation of the South American Overseas Chinese News Network, the Consumer Protection Agency (Procon-SP) of the State of São Paulo, Brazil announced on the 6th that the platforms of the social network operator Meta Company (formerly Facebook Company) Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram stopped serving for nearly 6 hours on October 4 this year, so they fined Meta Brazil more than 11 million reais (about 12.83 million yuan) on the charge of "improper service provision". In this regard, the company expressed dissatisfaction and will file an appeal.

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According to Procon-SP, the reason for the penalty was that the six-hour-long crash had adversely affected more than 91,000 Facebook consumers, more than 90,000 Instagram consumers and more than 156,000 WhatsApp consumers in Brazil, according to the Brazilian "techtudo" website. The agency noted that the amount of the fine was calculated in accordance with the provisions of Brazil's Consumer Protection Law (CDC).

Fernando Capez, the agency's executive director, said the network failures of these platforms have cost millions of consumers in Brazil and around the world. He said: "Although the platform is free to use, the operating company can profit from the user, so there is a consumption relationship between the two sides. ”

The agency also noted that unfair terms were found in the use agreements of the three platforms that violated Brazil's Consumer Protection Law. According to Procon-SP, Facebook has clauses in the platform usage agreement that stipulate that the platform does not assume any responsibility for problems that may arise in the course of the service. Such clauses are grounds for abuse because, by law, operating companies are obliged to respond to defects and malfunctions caused by their services.

In addition, Procon-SP cites another alleged violation of the terms in these applications, namely that "(in some cases) the Company has the right to unilaterally change the contract of use, such as changing the user account name, terminating or adjusting the service content, and deleting or locking certain content.".

In response to the penalties imposed by consumer protection agencies, Meta said it had objections. A spokesperson for the company said: "Meta invests in technology and human resources to guarantee the free use and uptime of the platform and to make its systems increasingly flexible. We will appeal and also trust Procon-SP to accept our clarification. The company explained that the reason for the service outage was a misconfiguration of the backbone router that coordinates network traffic between data centers. (Original title: Downtime for 6 hours São Paulo Consumer Association fined Meta 11 million reais)