Interested in opening an Internet business? Well, you missed the opportunity of the century. On Monday evening, for a few minutes, among the names available for sale as a domain, appeared that of Facebook.com. Yes, for a few minutes the most famous domain in the history of the Internet was free. It was the most grotesque (or amusing, depending on your point of view) effect of the configuration error of the gigantic and sophisticated BGP (or Border Gateway Protocol) servers of the most powerful and widespread social network in the world on which they also run Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, as well as the gateway to Oculus virtual reality. The damage, in reality, lasted much longer than the momentary amnesia of DNS. For more than five hours, until late Monday evening (in Europe), the 3,5 billion users who use the services of Marc Zuckerberg's empire every month were unable to send or receive messages or consult information via Instagram. "Only" 14 million customers protested, the tip of the iceberg, who forwarded their protest to the Menlo Park office, contributing to the general panic. But the damage was almost incalculable, everywhere. In India, for example, where most commercial traffic goes through Facebook, until yesterday the most reliable medium. And so on.
It is useless to cry out to sabotage. Albeit gritted teeth, the social network admitted that the interruption depended on a internal failure. "Our teams of engineers - reads an embarrassed press release - have ascertained that a change in the configuration of the routers that coordinate the traffic between our data centers has created technical difficulties that have led to the blocking of all communication". What the statement doesn't say is that the blackout has not only isolated Facebook from the rest of the world, but has sent internal communications into a tailspin, to the point that, with great difficulty, it was necessary to gather a team of technicians in half of America to send on site. Another slap to the supremacy of connectivity on the physical world.
No, there is no trace, at least for now, of sabotage. But it's hard to escape the temptation to conspiracy theorize. The flop of Zuckerberg's creatures demonstrated yesterday, if ever there were the need, at what point the dependence on social media has arrived, which convey opinions often piloted by the "Beast" (copyright by Matteo Salvini). All a few hours later the appeal of the Antitrust to the Federal Trade Commission which asks to cancel the purchase of WhatsApp (one billion dollars) and Instagram (19 billion) for violation of the laws on competition. A similar appeal has been rejected in the past, but the Antitrust has returned to office. And just on Monday, a couple of hours before the ugly mess, Facebook had responded by defining the accusation of monopoly as "absurd".
But the worst is probably yet to come. With the angelic appearance of Frances Haugen, blonde computer engineer who for two years was part of the Civic Integrity Team, that is one of the teams put together by Facebook to investigate and prosecute online crimes and abuses. But Miss Haugen has become an implacable accuser of Facebook's methods. The social network, perhaps the most defamatory accusation, has kept silent about the results of the internal investigation on damage to adolescents caused by the incorrect and unsupervised use of Instagram because "profit has always been privileged over safety". No less serious is the reference to misinformation before the presidential election. Also in that case the controls were omitted to favor traffic and advertising”.
Precisely the abandonment of these security systems would also be co-responsible for theassault on Congress of 6 January last. “They thought that if they changed the algorithms to make the system more secure, people would spend less time on social media, click less ads” and Facebook “would make less money,” he said. And so on in a crescendo of increasingly serious accusations.
Miss Haugen collected dozens of documents, among other things without violating company secrets "because they were files available to all 60 employees" and forwarded them to the attention of the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch's newspaper which built a formidable investigation on this material that threatens Zuckerberg more than the blackout itself. Frances Haugen, daughter of Protestant pastors, celiac, former companion of a manager who fought in vain against misinformation, has already relaunched her accusations on 60 Minutes, America's most watched news broadcast and already tonight she will give an encore to Congress by renewing The all-American myth of the civic witness, the whistleblower, against the overwhelming power of money.
