Yesterday was a bad day for Mark Zuckerburg. It all started Sunday night, when a former employee named Frances Haugen did an interview with “60 Minutes”, exposing all kinds of internal corruption at Facebook. Including the fact that Facebook intentionally prioritizes incendiary content, because they make more money that way.
Also, they KNEW Instagram was increasing suicidal thoughts and eating disorders among young girls, and really didn’t do anything about it. (She’s testifying before Congress today.)
Then, yesterday at about 11:30 A.M. Eastern, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger all went down, and didn’t return until the evening.
By 4 o’clock, they’d lost nearly $60 million in revenue, about $13 million per hour, or $220,000 a minute. And Zuckerberg saw his personal net worth decrease by about $7 BILLION.
It’s still not clear what caused the outage, but it appears to have been a problem with the Domain Name System, which translates website names into IP addresses that can be read by a computer.
(Here’s a key point from Haugen’s interview. And you can watch the whole thing here.)
“Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they'll click on less ads, they'll make less money,” says Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. https://t.co/wbxxfgorNE pic.twitter.com/zpQIwcdatr
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 3, 2021
