Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Messenger and Oculus – all Facebook-owned properties – all went offline Monday, and odd that the outage came the day/morning after the “60 Minutes” interview with former Facebook employee turned whistleblower Frances Haugen.

“The documents, first reported in a series of (Wall Street) Journal stories, revealed that the company’s executives understood the negative impacts of Instagram among younger users and that Facebook’s algorithm enabled the spread of misinformation, among other things,” CNBC reported.

In the 60 Minutes interview, Haugen said, among other things, that Facebook is “tearing our societies apart and is causing ethnic violence around the world.”

By design.

In fact, in Myanmar in 2019, the military used Facebook to launch a genocide.

 

According to Haugen, in 2018, the company made a change to its algorithm in order to increase engagement. What engages people? Content that is “hateful, that is divisive, that is polarizing. It’s easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions,” said Hauge.

 

We will remind you that back in 2014, Facebook Manipulated 689,003 Users’ Emotions For Science. “A recent study shows Facebook playing a whole new level of mind gamery with its users,” Forbes reported. “As first noted by The New Scientist and Animal New York, Facebook’s data scientists manipulated the News Feeds of 689,003 users, removing either all of the positive posts or all of the negative posts to see how it affected their moods…”*Probably* nobody was driven to suicide,” tweeted one professor linking to the study, adding a “#jokingnotjoking” hashtag.”

 

For the record and as the Forbes article points out, “Facebook’s data use policy — that I’m sure you’ve all read — says  Facebookers’ information will be used “for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement,” making all users potential experiment subjects.”

Said Haugen, “Facebook discovered that if they made the content safer, people would spend less time on the site, would view less ads, and Facebook would make less money.”

 

Due to the algorithm change, Facebook has changed politics and national leadership, and the way leaders lead their countries, forcing them to take positions that are bad for their countries and societies.

Which gives Mark Zuckerberg more power than heads of state.

 

Meanwhile, as for Instagram harming teenage girls, Facebook knows that it makes them more depressed – which leads to more engagement.

As we’ve said before: Facebook. George Orwell’s Ministry of Love.

 

Despite Mark Zuckerberg’s frequent assurances to Congress et al that Facebook’s mission is to connect the world and bring people closer, it seems that their mission is to enrich their coffers at any cost, time and again choosing profits over safety. Which is clearly documented in the information Hauge appropriated from the company prior to leaving her position and note: Facebook is a publicly traded company and required to not lie to its investors or withhold material information, according to SEC rules.

 

So why the protracted outage? Tweeted @sheeraf: “Was just on phone with someone who works for FB who described employees unable to enter buildings this morning to begin to evaluate extent of outage because their badges weren’t working to access doors”

Tweeted @BenjaminEnfield, “So, someone deleted large sections of the routing….that doesn’t mean Facebook is just down, from the looks of it….that means Facebook is GONE.”

 

Or just needed some time – away from prying eyes, including those of employees – to wipe information, maybe make a few tweaks to the algo and otherwise make some very major changes across platforms.

Although, as we’ve said before, in this highly surveilled world, the truth always comes out.

 

According to a Facebook update, the problem was “cconfiguration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”

Very strange timing.

 

We have yet to see how this will all play out, but we will remind you that despite its thousands of employees and nearly three billion users, important to note that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is the majority shareholder and can pretty much do what he wants with and at Facebook. And that all of the damage that’s Facebook has done in the world took basically just one person. Just one person can make all the difference.

 

Like, say, Frances Haugen.

 

Time will tell if it truly was a “configuation problem” or if, despite all its power, wealth and reach, the Empire blinked.  After all, Luke Skywalker’s proton torpedo did some very serious damage to the Death Star. Onward and forward.