Facebook’s week has started out bad and immediately went into overdrive-worse as Monday began.
On Sunday night, 60 minutes aired a damning interview with a whistleblower by the name of Frances Haugen, a former employee.
The interview details allegations that Facebook knows all about how their algorithm was designed to keep people on their site by facilitating the creation of bad content that emotionally charges these users.
There are also other allegations that Facebook has distinctly targeted children and teenagers on their platforms.
Monday began with all Facebook properties going down: Facebook.com, Instagram.com, and What’s App.
Facebook said the following on Twitter in an update on the situation this morning:
Shares of Facebook stock also went down by levels exceeding five percent Monday. This is the worst trading day they have had for over a year. Mark Zuckerberg has lost more than $6 billion during this drop.
Facebook Hacked: 1.5 Billion Facebook Users Lose Personal Information to a Hacker Discussion Forum
As if the first two issues weren’t enough, Facebook’s week also began with PrivacyAffairs reporting a massive hack of Facebook data, which includes personal information of over 1.5 billion users on the platform.
A popular hacking forum is selling the information, with cybercriminals and unethical advertisers paying more than $5,000 for the entire data dump.
The data appears to contain the following personal information including the user’s name, email address, the location of the user, their gender, their actual phone number, along with their Facebook user ID.
It’s possible that this could be a scam because some users of the forum have reported that absolutely nothing has been received from the seller. But samples of this data that were shown on that forum appear to back up the claims and that it could very well be an authentic data dump.
We will continue to report on this developing story as more information comes to light.
Update 10/4/2021 4:15 p.m.: Facebook is now back up as of 3:05 p.m., PT.
