Facebook megathread

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/30/18203551/apple-facebook-blocked-internal-ios-apps
Apple has shut down Facebook’s ability to distribute internal iOS apps, from early releases of the Facebook app to basic tools like a lunch menu. A person familiar with the situation tells The Verge that early versions of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and other pre-release “dogfood” (beta) apps have stopped working, as have other employee apps, like one for transportation. Facebook is treating this as a critical problem internally, we’re told, as the affected apps simply don’t launch on employees’ phones anymore.

The shutdown comes in response to news that Facebook has been using Apple’s program for internal app distribution to track teenage customers with a “research” app.

That app, revealed yesterday by TechCrunch, was distributed outside of the App Store using Apple’s enterprise program, which allows developers to use special certificates to install more powerful apps onto iPhones. Those apps are only supposed to be used by a company’s employees, however, and Facebook had been distributing its tracking app to customers. Facebook later said it would shut down the app.

This poses a huge issue for Facebook. While Apple provides other tools a company can use to install apps internally, Apple’s enterprise program is the main solution for widely distributing internal apps and services. In an email, a Facebook spokesperson said “I can confirm that this affects our internal apps.”

In a statement given to Recode, Apple said that Facebook was in “clear breach of their agreement with Apple.” Any developer that breaches that agreement, Apple said, has their distribution certificates revoked, “which is what we did in this case to protect our users and their data.” Apple declined to comment on shutting down all of Facebook’s internal apps in an email to The Verge.

Revoking a certificate not only stops apps from being distributed on iOS, but it also stops apps from working. And because internal apps by the same organization or developer may be connected to a single certificate, it can lead to immense headaches like the one Facebook now finds itself in where a multitude of internal apps have been shut down.

Apple and Facebook have already been bickering over privacy, but this is the first instance of Apple taking an action that directly shuts down some of Facebook’s activities. Last March, Apple CEO Tim Cook criticized Facebook’s handling of the Cambridge Analytica data sharing scandal, saying, “I wouldn’t be in this situation” if he were running the company. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg later said the comments were “extremely glib” and spoke of Apple as a company that “work hard to charge you more.”
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Fareal said:
May I bring something from normiemom FB here?

Elsewhere on the site we've mentioned MLMs (Mary Kay, Scentsy, etc; those companies that recruit usually women to buy shitty product and then resell it).

For Reasons, I'm in a lot of the anti MLM FB groups. Which are pretty much all closed. And the most active members/owners of those get facebook jailed (unable to post with no reason/explanation given) all the fucking time. Like, in high profile groups, a bunch of people are in facebook jail on any given day.

The groups also are hidden when you try to search for them at times, and at times even direct links to them don't work, regardless of the security settings.

I think this sort of content filtering - to hide bad press or negative discussion - by FB, if companies pay them for it, is way more common that this article suggests.
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It may sound a bit :neckbeard:, but I'm sure the people running big social media are aware that critical thinking itself is not advertiser friendly, or conducive to plebs typing out a nonstop stream of fresh garbage content.

All the ORANGE MAN BAD people who cheer this on should be aware that the instant the DNC rewrites its policies on certain topics, everything that goes against the new doctrine will likewise be tossed in the black hole. And they will eventually shift on certain topics, that's inevitable.
 
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Quijibo69 said:
Most of those people are NPCs to begin with. Who knew?
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Boomer generation SAHMs (although they are mostly grandmas by now) tend to lean rightwards. If you really wanted to break FB, just content filter every God meme and every mention of "so blessed". The site will be emptier than an incel's Tinder matches
 
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Maggots on a Train v2 said:
It may sound a bit :neckbeard:, but I'm sure the people running big social media are aware that critical thinking itself is not advertiser friendly, or conducive to plebs typing out a nonstop stream of fresh garbage content.

All the ORANGE MAN BAD people who cheer this on should be aware that the instant the DNC rewrites its policies on certain topics, everything that goes against the new doctrine will likewise be tossed in the black hole. And they will eventually shift on certain topics, that's inevitable.
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It is ridiculous how hard the articles calling this a stunt miss this point. Censorship hurts the disenfranchised more than it hurts anyone else.
 
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Haramburger said:
There are actually coroners and medical examiners that suffer with STS, it just isn't as obvious outside the field without a journalist drawing attention to it via social media.
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Yeah, it's pretty common and not talked about enough. Veterinarians have a super high suicide rate, most likely due to long hours, poor pay, knowledge of euthanasia techniques, crippling college debt, the idea that it's normal to put down suffering creatures as a standard part of the profession, the amount of pets they have to put down and the children who leave crying, having just seen their beloved cat or dog for the last time...
 
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www.bbc.com

Facebook and Instagram suffer most severe outage ever

The social network confirms problems with its "family of apps", but the cause is currently unknown.
www.bbc.com

Facebook is suffering the most severe outage in its history, with key services rendered unusable for users globally for much of Wednesday.

The last time Facebook had a disruption of this magnitude was in 2008, when the site had 150m users - compared to around 2.3bn monthly users today.

Facebook's main product, its two messaging apps and image-sharing site Instagram were all affected.

The cause of the interruption has not yet been made public.

"We're aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps," Facebook said in a statement.

"We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible."

In response to rumours posted on other social networks, the company said the outages were not a result of a Distributed Denial of Service attack, known as DDoS - a type of cyber-attack that involves flooding a target service with extremely high volumes of traffic.
How widespread is the problem?

Estimates suggest the issue began around 16:00 GMT on Wednesday.

While Facebook's main service appeared to load, users reported not being able to post.

Those on Instagram were not able to refresh feeds or post new material. Facebook Messenger's desktop version did not load - but the mobile app appeared to allow the sending of some messages; however, users reported glitches with other kinds of content, such as images. WhatsApp, Facebook's other messaging app, had similar problems.

A third-party outage map suggested the problem was global - DownDetector monitors posts on other social networks for users mentioning a loss of service elsewhere.

The issue also affected Facebook Workplace, the companies service for businesses to communicate internally.

Buenos Aires-based designer Rebecca Brooker told the BBC the interruption was having a significant impact on their work.

"Facebook for personal use is fine - but what happens when we rely on large companies such as this to provide business services?" she said.

"I'm trying to communicate with my team in New York. Facebook Workplace is our only channel for [communication] with the exception of email."

In the UK, an NHS paediatric consultant told the BBC how staff were upset not to be kept updated on a party being held for a beloved nurse who was retiring after 20 years.

"Being a working day most consultants could not make it," said Dr Nikhil Ganjoo. "So I represented them - but was unable to share the retirement party pics with them as it happened."

The outage is occurring against a political backdrop of legislators in the US and beyond considering whether large technology firms - not just Facebook - should be broken up.

Elizabeth Warren, who is hoping to be the Democratic candidate in the next US presidential election, told the New York Times: "We need to stop this generation of big tech companies from throwing around their political power to shape the rules in their favour and throwing around their economic power to snuff out or buy up every potential competitor."

On Wednesday's issue, Ms Brooker added on Twitter: "Look at what happens when we let one company control everything.

"I figured this could happen eventually but it's extremely crippling to be part of this monopoly."
What's the reaction been?

While Facebook and Instagram have been down, many have turned to Twitter to make jokes about the outage.

The hashtags #FacebookDown and #InstagramDown have been used more than 150,000 times so far.

Some Twitter users who work in "Facebook-centric" jobs, expressed their panic and distress at being unable to use the platform.
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Many shared jokes about the social media outage leading to the collapse of society, as "nobody remembers how to reach loved ones or eat food without posting updates".
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Others have shared a version of the "distracted boyfriend" meme, referencing people turning to Twitter in their hour of need.
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Some users reflected on how the outage had exposed their reliance on the social media networks.
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Poking fun at the popularity of cat content on social media, one user shared their concern for all the cats unable to upload videos.
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Some joked that the lack of access to Facebook would deprive them of validation.
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Hard to stay running when the FBI coordinates a global seizure of your database servers.

It takes a long time to put new iron in place, reapportion and copy backups from tape to it, and then distribute on the network.

*If you are not familiar with how a site like FB is run, assets are split among different servers. You have one (one group of hundreds or thousands, not one server) for the user interface, ie, phone and web. A server for the "apps" (not to be confused with phone apps). And lastly, the majority of user data will be on potentially millions of blade servers. Those are what was taken. So Facebook is still up, but you can't post, because the database servers are gone.
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r/news - Comment by u/DigitallyDisrupt on ”Facebook suffers the most severe outage in its history”

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