Facebook Faces Selloff after Outage and Whistleblower

Facebook and its other applications Instagram and WhatsApp were inaccessible to millions of users starting around 11:40 a.m. US Eastern time today. Tracking sites showed, the outage impacting potentially tens of millions of users.

Facebook and its family of apps which include Instagram; WhatsApp; Messenger and Oculus began displaying error messages around 11:40 a.m. Eastern time, users reported.

According to the New York Times within minutes, Facebook had disappeared from the internet. The outage lasted over five hours.

The social media giant eventually restored service to users after a team of techs gained access to servers at the companies data center in Santa Clara, California. The apps slowly came back to life, through Facebook cautioned the services would take time to stabilize.

The outage mysteriously comes a day after a Facebook whistleblower went on network news TV to reveal her identity after leaking a trove of internal documents to US authorities. She alleges Facebook knew its products were fueling hate countrywide and harming children’s mental health.

Facebook under huge scrutiny

Ms. Frances Haugen, a 37-year-old data scientist who worked for companies including Google and Pinterest said in an interview with the CBS news TV show “60 Minutes” that Facebook was “grotesquely worse” than anything she had witnessed before.

The world’s social media giant has been embroiled in a firestorm brought about by Haugen. US lawmakers and The Wall Street Journal detailed how executives knew its products, including Instagram, were harming young girls, especially around body image.

The Tech Giants stock on Monday tumbled in its worst daily loss since last November.

Laffer Tengler Investments chief investment officer Nancy Tengler said Monday investors should be worried. Tengler said regulatory uncertainty pushed her firm to remove Facebook from its 12 best ideas portfolio. Laffer Tengler Investments also trimmed its Facebook holdings to 3% from 5% in its diversified portfolio.

Facebook’s stock is down 16% from its prior high. The tech giant did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the outage or its stock prices.

Source: NY Times, CNBC