Edward Ongweso Jr writes:

On Monday, a global service outage hit Facebook and took down the world’s ubiquitous social network , along with Instagram and WhatsApp. The outage, which affects billions of people, occurred just as Facebook filed a motion to dismiss the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s amended antitrust complaint against the company accusing it of acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp to consolidate anti-competitive market power.

The day before the outage, on Sunday, the Facebook whistleblower behind devastating leaks that have roiled the company for weeks revealed themselves on “60 Minutes”: Frances Haugen, a former product manager. In profiles of Haugen that followed immediately after, one thread constantly revisited was that Haugen did not want to harm Facebook, only fix it.

The Wall Street Journal said the last time she went on Workplace, Facebook’s internal website, she typed a final message into the search bar, knowing it would be logged. “I don’t hate Facebook,” she wrote. “I love Facebook. I want to save it.”

To that end, Haugen turned over files to state attorney generals, journalists, and filed a Securities and Exchange Commission whistleblower complaint that accused Facebook of misleading investors by lying to the public. Notably, Haugen did not share documents with the Federal Trade Commission, which has been pursuing antitrust action against Facebook since antitrust scholar Lina Khan was appointed as chair.

“The path forward is about transparency and governance,” Haugen said in a video posted by Whistleblower Aid on Sunday. “It’s not about breaking up Facebook.” The founder of Whistleblower Aid, John Tye, told the New York Times that Haugen “generally does not see antitrust as the most important policy approach.” Instead, Tye said, she “wants to see meaningful regulatory reform focused on transparency and accountability.”

It is hard to reconcile that viewpoint with the reality of the current situation: for the past decade, Facebook has not simply had a deleterious effect on the general public, but established itself as the major if not sole conduit for internet activity across the world with a series of ruthless acquisitions that are now under scrutiny for breaking antitrust law. At the time of writing, people around the world are being affected in numerous, sometimes serious, ways due to Facebook being down. For many of them, Facebook being down is the same as “the internet” being down. For millions, WhatsApp is how they regularly communicate with family and friends on a daily basis.

And If Facebook had its way over the years, the outage could have had even more widespread effects. [Continue reading…]