Facebook outage stings as whistleblower plans to reveal all

Facebook Inc.’s worldwide crash exposed the risks of relying on its social networking products, bolstering European regulators’ drive to contain its reach just as a U.S. whistle-blower’s testimony threatens to attract more unwanted scrutiny at home.

Facebook Inc.’s worldwide crash exposed the risks of relying on its social networking products, bolstering European regulators’ drive to contain its reach just as a U.S. whistle-blower’s testimony threatens to attract more unwanted scrutiny at home.

While Europe awoke to find Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger services back online, the scale of Monday’s blackout quickly led to criticism. The European Union’s antitrust chief and digital czar, Margrethe Vestager, said the Facebook failure would focus minds on the company’s dominance. 

 “It’s always important that people have alternatives and choices. This is why we work on keeping digital markets fair and contestable,” Vestager said. “An outage as we have seen shows that it’s never good to rely only on a few big players, whoever they are.”

The networking problem that brought down services used by more than 2.75 billion people couldn’t have come at a worse time. After a U.S. television interview on Sunday, whistle-blower Frances Haugen will appear before a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday and will tell lawmakers what she calls the “frightening truth” about Facebook. Haugen’s accusations that the company prioritizes profit over user safety were still making headlines as Facebook services were down.   

The revelations prompted U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to highlight the risks faced by countries that rely on the services for communication.

Facebook climbed as much as 1.8 per cent to US$332 in New York premarket trading, paring a 4.9 per cent slump Monday.