Facebook Inc. Shutdown and Nobel Prize Winners
Continue reading to know what really happened to Facebook; and revealing 2021's Nobel Prize awardees so far.
Issue #4
Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp Shut Down
Social media apps; Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp were temporarily shut down on Monday, 4th October. The shutdown began at around 5 p.m Nigerian time, and lasted for at least six hours before access was gradually restored.
Facebook is owned by Facebook Inc., founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 who later acquired Instagram; a photo and video sharing app and Whatsapp, an instant messaging app. Other apps affected by the shutdown included Ovulus VR and Facebook Workplace which is used for facilitating news sharing, online group works and video conferencing.
About 2.9 million users were unable to make and view posts or refresh existing updates, send or receive messages.
Could the whistleblower incidence have a hand in this?
Frances Haugen, a 37-year-old former Facebook product manager who worked on civic integrity issues at the company revealed in the interview “60 Minutes” on CNN, documents that show that Facebook is aware that its platforms are being used to spread hate, violence and misinformation and that the company has tried to hide that evidence. This interview aired a night before the shutdown.
"The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook, and Facebook over and over again chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money," Haugen told "60 Minutes."
What is certain though is that the affected apps were unavailable due to a global outage impacting the popular social media services. According to Kentik aggregate NetFlow data, Internet traffic to Facebook services virtually disappeared at 15:39 UTC on Monday, October 4, 2021 with initial indications pointing to a DNS problem. For clarity, Facebook took away the map telling the world’s computers how to find its various online properties.
The result?
NetBlocks reported that the shutdown cost the global economy about $160m each hour of the shutdown. NetBlocks tracks internet outages and their impact.
Facebook stocks also were down by 5.5% and Zuckerberg himself incurred losses that amounts to as much as $7bn.
Facebook has previously shut down temporarily in November 2019, and April 2018. Google apps also went down for a while on December 14, 2020.
Nobel Prize Winners
American scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian won the 2021 Nobel Prize for Medicine on Monday for the discovery of receptors in the skin that sense temperature and touch and could pave the way for new painkillers. The knowledge gathered from these scientists’ independent discoveries is being used to develop treatments for a wide range of disease conditions, including chronic pain.
The prize for physics went to trio; Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi on Tuesday for work that helps understand complex physical systems such as Earth's changing climate.
The Nobel Prize is a five separate prize awarded yearly to individuals who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind, in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Physiology or Medicine and Peace. See here.
The ceremony holds virtually this year, with awardees announced and awards delivered to Nobel laureates in their homes. Prizes for Chemistry, Literature and Peace would be announced Wednesday through Friday respectively.
329 candidates are nominated for the Peace Prize award including the Black Lives Matter Movement and former White House adviser Jared Kushner and his deputy, Avi Berkowitz, who negotiated a series of Middle East agreements known as the Abraham Accords.
Worth Reading 📚
Read: Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka releases first novel in over forty years. Here’s a book review on “Chronicles From the Land of The Happiest People on Earth”
Read: David Hundeyin’s expose on the rise of a terrorist group in Conflakes for Jihad: The Boko Haram Origin Story.
Worth Watching 📽️
Watch: Superstar Davido on “The Daily Show” with Trevor Noah. “A Better Time” & Bringing Nigerians Together Worldwide.
Watch: Discovering talents you never knew you had with drawing. How to draw to remember more by Graham Shaw.
This newsletter was put together while listening to My Universe by Coldplay and BTS.
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