Facebook ruled out on Tuesday that the worldwide blackout of its services on Monday for six hours was caused by a computer attack and blamed it on a technical error caused by the company itself.
In an entry on the corporate blog, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, said that the fall in services “was not caused by malicious activity, but by an error caused by ourselves.”
The fall of Facebook and its owned platforms (Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) began minutes before 2:00 p.m. GMT on Monday and left millions of Internet users around the planet without service, who went to specialized portals such as Downdetector to report the situation.
Hours later, the CEO and co-founder of the social network, Mark Zuckerberg, publicly apologized.
Letter against
According to the Menlo Park (California, USA) firm, the efforts that the company itself has been making in recent years to restrict access to systems and thus protect it from possible external attackers were one of the causes that slowed down the response time to fix the crash.
“I think if the price to pay for increased system security on a day-to-day basis is slower recovery of services, it is worth it,” Janardhan wrote on the blog.
This same Tuesday, just one day after the blackout of the services, a former employee of the company testified before a subcommittee of the US Senate after the leaks that she herself made in recent days to The Wall Street Journal newspaper and after reveal his identity in an interview broadcast last Sunday during the CBS channel’s 60 Minutes program.
Frances Haugen told the senators that Facebook puts its benefits before the safety of users and hides that its platforms are harmful to minors, promote social division and weaken democracy.
– .
