Tag Archives: Facebook

Facebook execs including Zuckerberg show off prototype VR headsets ahead of developer conference

A year after Facebook released its Oculus Quest 2 VR headset, and weeks before Facebook’s VR and AR-focused Connect conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook CTO-to-be Andrew Bosworth showed off prototype VR headsets on social media. Whether these are anything related to products to come remains to be seen. I spent the day with the Facebook …

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Fingerprint checking YubiKey Bio security key helps banish passwords

Yubico on Tuesday began selling two new hardware security keys called YubiKey Bio that incorporate fingerprint recognition to add an extra level of login security on a single device. The UBS-C key costs $85 and the USB-A key $80. Hardware security keys such as Yubico’s are often used in combination with passwords to bolster conventional login processes. A hacker with …

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Facebook, Instagram fix issue that sparked another outage

Some Facebook, Instagram and Messenger users reported Friday that the apps weren’t working for them, days after the social media giant experienced a massive outage. Facebook then fixed the problem, which the company said arose from a “configuration change” that impacted users globally. “Sincere apologies to anyone who wasn’t able to access our products in the last couple of hours. We …

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Facebook, WhatsApp outage shows danger of relying on one company for messaging

Facebook’s worldwide outage this week of its key services, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, was annoying for some — and a cause for celebration for others — but it represented a breakdown in a critical line of communication.  WhatsApp, with more than 2 billion users on its service, serves as a primary form of communication, especially for family and friends …

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Facebook is ‘bullish’ about bringing more people online despite scrutiny

A day after Facebook experienced a massive outage, the social network’s executives and engineers gathered via video to chat about the company’s efforts to bring more people online. The impact of the six-hour outage wasn’t lost on Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer. People couldn’t message their family and friends and businesses couldn’t promote their products. “It is a good …

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Mark Zuckerberg rejects profits claim, slams ‘false picture’ of Facebook

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday broke his silence about a scandal plaguing the company in an email to employees, complaining of the “false picture” being painted of the social networking giant. The email, which was also posted to Zuckerberg’s Facebook account, follows a congressional hearing about Facebook’s effects on users. “I’m sure many of you have found the recent …

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Telegram says it added 70 million users during Facebook outage

Facebook’s hours-long outage on Monday left its nearly 3 billions users unable to connect with each other on the service, and apparently not everyone was content to wait for the social networking giant to work out its problem. The company behind Telegram, an instant-messaging-app rival to Facebook’s Messenger, said Tuesday that it added 70 million users while Facebook was offline …

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Instagram brings IGTV vids back to the main app with new Video tab

Instagram wants to make it simpler to watch videos on its platform. To see longer videos on the photo- and video-sharing social network, you used to need a separate app called IGTV. Now, the Facebook-owned company is merging the IGTV videos and the shorter videos you’d normally find in your feed into a single tab called Instagram Video. Announced via …

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Facebook explains what caused its widespread outage

Facebook said late Monday that the company believes a “faulty configuration” change caused a widespread outage that lasted roughly six hours. “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication,” Facebook’s vice president of engineering and infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, said in a blog post. …

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Facebook’s massive outage costs the company an estimated $60 million in revenue

Facebook’s massive outage is reportedly putting a big dent in the social network’s pocket. Fortune and Snopes estimate that the world’s largest social network has already lost at least $60 million in revenue since its apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, went offline at about 8:30 a.m. PT/11:30 a.m. ET on Monday.  Both outlets estimated the revenue loss for Facebook as …

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