Today we woke up with some failures on the most used social media apps. It all started with the texting platform Whatsapp and eventually reached Facebook and Instagram. While users have poured their discontent over Twitter, one of the social media platforms still standing, others turned into memes to ease their discontent. However, after hours and hours without any of these services owned by Mark Zuckerberg, an alleged account belonging to the hacker group ‘Anonymous’ has claimed responsibility for the outage.
“The world is already a better place without Facebook and Instagram” reads one of the many tweets user @YourAnonOne posted after the crash. In another of the many accounts that claim to belong to this organization, @YourAnonNews, It’s suggested that the outage is related to the recently revealed names of the Pandora Papers. It even goes beyond that, claiming that they now have full access to millions of accounts, including those of people in power, and that this isn’t going to stop with Zuckerberg’s platforms but that they will crash other apps like TikTok, Amazon, Telegram, among others.
While there’s no way to know if these accounts actually are part of the ‘Anonymous’ organization, neither if the hacker group is actually, behind the crash, what is true is that this failure has had immense repercussions on Zuckerberg’s business. Only a few hours after the crash began, it was reported on various media networks including Bloomberg, that Facebook’s CEO had already lost about 7 billion dollars from his personal wealth as Fb stock plummeted 4.8% on the market.
Social media outlets have started to come back slowly to normality; however, it’s still unclear the consequences the outage might have had on millions of users. Whether we use it for professional or personal matters, a big crash of these services could put personal information at risk. At the moment there’s no information on the matter since Facebook representatives only stated on Twitter that the services were down and they were working hard to make them work as soon as possible. Still, there hasn’t been an explanation on why this happened or if there is a risk of information breach for millions of users.
Photo from Pexels: Tima Miroshnichenko
