Another breakdown, another Facebook apology; new options for India users

By Asianet Newsable English | First Published Oct 9, 2021, 9:52 AM IST

This is the second breakdown of Facebook and its services like Instagram and Messenger this week. Many users complained that their Instagram feed was not loading properly, while others said that the application kept crashing.

Facebook was once again forced to apologise to its users after its services were disrupted for two hours on Friday.

This is the second breakdown of Facebook and its services like Instagram and Messenger this week.

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Many users complained that their Instagram feed was not loading properly, while others said that the application kept crashing.

We’re so sorry if you weren’t able to access our products during the last couple of hours. We know how much you depend on us to communicate with one another. We fixed the issue — thanks again for your patience this week.

— Facebook (@Facebook)

Even though Facebook tool Twitter hours later to confirm that they had rectified the issue, they did not confirm exactly why millions of Facebook users were unable to use its platforms.

On Monday, the American technology giant had blamed a faulty command for the massive six-hour disruption of services, including that of WhatsApp.

Also Read: Facebook whistleblower says firm can't filter hate speech in Hindi, Bengali

Facebook had said that a command had been given during a routine maintenance job to know the availability of the company's global backbone capacity, which unintentionally switched off all the connections in the backbone network.

That error disconnected Facebook data centres globally. Even though Facebook claims that its systems are designed to audit such commands to prevent errors like this, a bug in that audit tool prevented it from blocking the command.

The result? A complete snapping of server connections between Facebook's data centres and the Internet.

After fixing the problem, Facebook admitted that the outage was not caused by malicious activity, but an error of its own making

New Page Experience for India Users

Meanwhile, Facebook on Friday unveiled a new page design for users in India that will feature a dedicated news feed and options to navigate between a personal profile and a public page.

According to Facebook, the new layout comes with improved security features and enhanced ability to detect hate speech, spam, violent and sexual content.

Besides, Facebook also claims that the page conversations will be visible to wider audiences and show up more regularly in the followers' news feed.

Prominence would be given to comments from verified public figures and would be shown at the top of the comments section. Also, now users will have the option of following pages straight from the comments section and from recommendation posts.

Also Read: Apple users take to social media during global outage, say 'iMessage is king'

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