WASHINGTON, Oct 5, 2021 (BSS/AFP) - Facebook battled dueling crises Monday

as potentially billions of users were impacted when its dominant social
network went offline for seven hours, and the company fought against a
whistleblower's damning revelations.

  Many long-held fears and criticisms about the platform seem to have been
backed up by Facebook's own research, which ex-worker Frances Haugen has
turned over to authorities and the Wall Street Journal.

  But as US senators prepared for her highly anticipated Tuesday testimony on
the documents, Facebook went offline in an outage that hit users across its
platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp.

  "Billions of users have been impacted by the services being entirely
offline today," tracker Downdetector wrote on its website.

  Facebook apologized in a tweet later Monday Silicon Valley time, just as
the apps started to go back online.

  "We've been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are
happy to report they are coming back online now," the company added.

  Facebook late Monday blamed the outage on configuration changes it made to
routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centers.

  "This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our
data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt," Facebook vice
president of infrastructure Santosh Janardhan said in a post.

  Cyber security expert Brian Krebs described what happened as Facebook
taking away "the map telling the world's computers how to find its various
online properties."

  In addition to the disruption to people, businesses and others that rely on
the company's tools, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a financial hit.
Fortune's billionaire tracking website late Monday said Zuckerberg's personal
fortune plunged by nearly $6 billion from the prior day to land at just under
$117 billion.

  For Facebook's rivals, it was a good day, however.

  The messaging service Telegram went from the 56th most downloaded free app
in the US to the fifth, according to specialist firm SensorTower.

  The encrypted messaging app Signal tweeted that "millions" of new users had
joined, and added that it was "Signal and ready to mignal."

  It was not the only Twitter user to crack jokes over the outage, though
others complained about being cut off from contacts, their sources of income
or business tools.

  Some were philosophical, however -- such as Cindy Bennett, a baker in New
York City, who told AFP: "I think the world would probably be a better place
if everybody didn't know what everybody else was doing every second of every
minute of every day."

  - 'Make body dissatisfaction worse' -

   Facebook has pushed back hard against the outrage regarding its practices
and impact, but this is just the latest crisis to hit the business.

  US lawmakers for years have threatened to regulate Facebook and other
social media giants to address criticisms that the platforms trample on
privacy, provide a megaphone for dangerous misinformation and damage young
people's well-being.

  After years of criticism directed at social media, without major
legislative overhauls, some experts were skeptical that change was coming.

  "This is a situation where there's going to be a lot of smoke, and a lot of
fury, but not a lot of action," said Mark Hass, an Arizona State University
professor

  "It's going to have to come down to the platforms, feeling pressure from
their users feeling pressure from their employees," he added, noting
authorities won't effectively be able to regulate content.

  Haugen, a 37-year-old data scientist from Iowa, has worked for companies
including Google and Pinterest -- but said in an interview with CBS news show
"60 Minutes" that Facebook was "substantially worse" than anything she had
seen before.

  Facebook's vice president of policy and global affairs Nick Clegg
vehemently pushed back at the assertion its platforms are "toxic" for teens,
days after a tense, hours-long congressional hearing in which US lawmakers
grilled the company over its impact on the mental health of young users.