China News Network, October 6, comprehensive report, a few days ago, social media giant Facebook (Facebook) company's social media platforms were interrupted for several hours, affecting 3.5 billion users worldwide. Facebook said on the 5th that the cause of this incident was that the server "configuration replacement error" was made.
Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp were interrupted at noon EST on the 4th, and large-scale failures lasted for hours, and billions of users around the world could not log in. Facebook's statement on the 5th said: "We believe that the root cause of this network outage is a configuration replacement error. ”
The company did not disclose whether the responsible party or the configuration change went according to plan.
Infographic: A man passes by Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, Northern California, USA. Photo by Liu Guanguan, a reporter of the China News Service
[The accident lasted nearly 7 hours and affected billions of people]
According to the report, within a few hours of the accident, Facebook has not been able to explain the situation to the user, nor has it updated the maintenance progress, until the platform resumes service before issuing a statement to explain and apologize to the user. According to the news, Facebook engineers entered a server system located in a data center in Santa Clara, California, to restart the service before resuming service.
In the past, the failure of science and technology enterprises has occurred from time to time, but it is very rare for multiple platforms under a company like this to "crash" at the same time.
Facebook and its platforms have more than 3.5 billion users worldwide, many relying on programs to communicate with friends and family, businesses using programs to connect with customers, and many logging on to other websites through Facebook accounts. The failure affected the whole body, and the user's life and business operations were greatly affected.
Duffy, a professor in the Department of Communications at Cornell University in the United States, said that the failure reminded people of excessive dependence on Facebook and its platforms, showing that the current structure of the digital economy is not stable.
NBC also commented that this incident may be an opportunity for the public and governments to think about how to regulate large science and technology companies, including strengthening industry competition, to avoid a company crash dragging down the world's events again, "should not have any Internet companies too big to fail." ”
Infographic: Facebook founder Zuckerberg.
【Highlighting the monopoly risk of social platforms? 】
U.S. lawmakers have been demanding greater regulation of Facebook and other large social platforms for years, and Democratic progressive Rep. Ocasio Cortez said in a "Twitter" post that the incident highlighted the serious risks posed by Facebook's monopoly, "If the authorities regulate facebook's monopolistic behavior when they start acquiring other competitors, people around the world who rely on platforms such as WhatsApp and Instagram for communication and business will not be affected, reflecting that fb must be spun off." ”
Haas, a professor at Arizona State University, noted that social platforms have been criticized for years, but Congress has not taken a major legislative step, questioning when it will bring about change. ”
Facebook has been sending out a series of negative news in recent days. On October 3, a Facebook product manager came forward to admit that she was the whistleblower of the recent media investigation into Facebook. She accused Facebook of making money and ignoring the massive amount of hate speech and misinformation that flooded its platforms. The incident caused an uproar, with the female manager testifying in the Senate last week and this week.
Source: China News Network