Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp experience worldwide outage

Today’s Facebook testimony occurred a day after Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all experienced a worldwide shutdown. to learn more about what happened and talk about concerns over how dependent the world seems to be on Facebook, we spoke with Victor Benjamin, from ASU’s WP Carey School of Business.

Benjamin said Facebook’s DNS (Domain Name Service) servers were down for an unknown reason.

“Speculation is that because of the whole work from home arrangement the people who could fix that issue were not on sight to physically access the servers and configure them properly,” Benjamin said.

Benjamin said the early speculation was this was a major misconfiguration rather than an intentional hack.

“The pandemic and events yesterday really call into question some assumptions on how organizations and governments apply continuity in different means. If we’re so reliant on computational infastructure and that is made suddenly made unavailable or taken away from us what do we do? I think what we’re finding is organizations don’t have a back-up plan,” Benjamin said.

This all comes the day before the whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before Congress.

“I do think it calls into question is it in the interest of these platforms to really clean up that content and if it’s not how do we get them to do it for the benefit of society?” Benjamin said.