Techmeme
October 5, 2021, 6:25 AM

Top News

Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
Facebook's services and work tools return online after suffering a global outage for over six hours  —  Update: 5:55 p.m. ET: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger are slowly but surely coming back up after more than 6 hours of being down.  Your mileage may vary for now …
More: The Verge, VICE, NME, CNBC, VICE, Gizmodo, Fast Company, New York Times, WRAL TechWire, Coinspeaker, CNN, WTRF-TV, CNBC, The Economic Times, Search Engine Journal, The Verge, Reuters, Decrypt, Toronto Star, Bloomberg, New York Times, Digital Trends, PYMNTS.com, and BleepingComputer
Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook
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Santosh Janardhan / Facebook Engineering:
Facebook says configuration changes on its backbone routers disrupted network traffic between its data centers, causing an outage across its platforms  —  To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today's outage across our platforms.
Celso Martinho / The Cloudflare Blog:
Cloudflare says prior to Facebook's outage, Facebook issued several BGP updates, causing DNS resolution errors that knocked Facebook off the web  —  “Facebook can't be down, can it?”, we thought, for a second.  —  Today at 15:51 UTC, we opened an internal incident entitled …
New York Times:
Facebook employees and an internal memo say that, several hours into the incident, Facebook's security experts were still trying to identify the root issue  —  When apps used by billions of people worldwide blinked out, lives were disrupted, businesses were cut off from customers …
Amy Cheng / Washington Post:
WhatsApp's global popularity, especially in developing countries, made its outage even more acute, impacting services in Lebanon, India, Brazil, and Mexico  —  When WhatsApp and other Facebook-owned apps went dark around 11:40 a.m. Eastern time on Monday, online tracker Downdetector received some 14 million reports of the outage.
Catalin Cimpanu / The Record:
Europol announces the arrest of two alleged ransomware gang members in Ukraine, with help from US and French authorities, as some think they may belong to REvil  —  Two members of a ransomware gang were arrested in Ukraine following a joint international law enforcement operation.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Review of the now-released Windows 11: improved modern UI and sounds, but many promised features like Android apps are missing and new taskbar is a step back  —  Microsoft's new OS is a work in progress  —  Microsoft wants Windows 11 to feel familiar.  While the company has attempted drastic changes …
Reuters:
Frances Haugen's prepared Senate testimony: Facebook putting profits over safety has resulted in a system that amplifies division, extremism, and polarization  —  Former Facebook (FB.O) employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen will urge the U.S. Congress on Tuesday to regulate the social media giant …
Scott Pelley / CBS News:
Jeff Horwitz / Wall Street Journal:
Scott Carpenter / Bloomberg:
Mark Zuckerberg's personal wealth fell ~$7B amid whistleblower exposé and Facebook outages; Facebook stock dropped ~5% Monday and is down ~15% since mid-Sept.  —  - CEO drops to No. 5 on list of world's richest, below Gates  — Stock slide knocks his net worth down to $120.9 billion
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / VICE:
Filing: Syniverse, which routes texts for AT&T, Verizon, and others, says hackers had access to its databases and customer logins for 5 years; logins were reset  —  Syniverse handles billions of text messages a year, and hackers had unauthorized access to its system for years.
Andrei Frumusanu / AnandTech:
Review of Apple's A15 shows big efficiency gains and adequate speed improvements, which range from 2.5% to 37% over A14 depending on the type of workload  —  A few weeks ago, we've seen Apple announce their newest iPhone 13 series devices, a set of phones being powered by the newest Apple A15 SoC.

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Harrison Weber / dot.LA: