Black day for Facebook: Apps crash for hours and stocks drop

Facebook saw many of its services fail, on Monday, not only in Portugal, but around the world. But the tech giant’s problems didn’t stop there: At the end of the day, in addition to dealing with problems with complaining that they prefer hateful content, violence and misinformation, the company that owns Instagram and Whatsapp has seen its stock. It fell 5.75%, one of the worst declines in 12 months.

In Portugal the problems began to feel Significantly since 16:30, Lusa agency found regarding Facebook and Instagram. However, the problem was felt all over the world. Users from countries such as the United States, Mexico, France, Romania, Norway, Georgia and Greece are already registered on the portal. Downdetector who have problems.

In the case of the WhatsApp messaging app, when users send messages, the clock icon appears and the message is not sent.

A few hours later, the company’s shares were down about 6%, nearly $19 (about 16 euros), to a minimum of $323 per share (about 278 euros).

The problem directly affected the owner of Facebook. In the hours when social networks were out of service, Mark Zuckerberg lost six billion dollars (nearly 5.17 billion euros) due to the devaluation of the stock market, which made him drop in the list of the richest people in the world.

This drop comes after a former employee Expose the hacked data from the company to The Wall Street Journal, exited from anonymity. Frances Haugen, 37, a data science professional with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a master’s degree in management from Harvard University, publicly criticizes Mark Zuckerberg’s company for “improving for their own interests” rather than in pursuit of the “public interest”.

Haugen claims that the social media giant has misled investors and withheld its knowledge of the effects of hate speech and disinformation on its platforms.

The woman was hired by the company in 2019, after working for 15 years at tech companies like Google or Pinterest. “I’ve been on different social networks and Facebook has been so much worse than I’ve ever seen,” he told journalist Scott Bailey.

So this year, I decided to copy hundreds of thousands of pages of company documents, which prove that Facebook was doing less than it could to combat the spread of hateful content, violence, and misinformation.