Big guns
quit Facebook amid outage crisis
Several big guns of Facebook have resigned, with Chief
product officer Chris Cox becoming the highest-ranking manager to depart amid
the turmoil at the leading social network.
Cox made his announcement on his Facebook page, saying he
was leaving “with great sadness” after 13 years.
While Cox gave no specific reason for his move, he noted
that Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has unveiled a new direction away from
being the “digital town square” to focus on smaller-scale, private
interactions.
“As Mark has outlined, we are turning a new page in our
product direction, focused on an encrypted, interoperable, messaging network,”
Cox wrote.
Read also: Facebook introduces game features
Read also: Facebook introduces game features
Facebook also said WhatsApp chief Chris Daniels is leaving
the company.
The new head of the Facebook-owned application will be Fidji
Simo, who was previously in charge of video, games and monetization at
Facebook.
Will Cathcart will be the new head of WhatsApp.
The departures came as Facebook blamed a “server
configuration change” Thursday for a massive outage affecting its applications
around the world and brought fresh attention to the embattled social networking
leader.
The outage affected users for at least 12 hours in most
areas of the world, with the biggest impact in North America and Europe,
according to the tracking website downdetector.com.
After acknowledging the problem Wednesday, Facebook remained
silent on the issue for nearly 24 hours before issuing an explanation and
apology around 1630 GMT Thursday.
“Yesterday, as a result of a server configuration change,
many people had trouble accessing our apps and services,” a Facebook tweet
said.
“We’ve now resolved the issues and our systems are
recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s
patience.”
The outage was believed to be the worst ever for the
internet giant that reaches an estimated 2.7 billion people with its core
social network, Instagram and messaging applications.
As with previous disruptions, #FacebookDown quickly became a
popular hashtag on rival platform Twitter.
On Wednesday, Facebook rejected speculation that the problem
may have been the result of a denial-of-service attack — a type of cyberattack
that overloads the host of a service with superfluous requests.
A Facebook outage in November last year was attributed to a
server problem, and a September disruption was said to have been the result of
“networking issues.”
Bloomberg News reported that Facebook was considering
refunds for advertisers whose messages could not be delivered, although the
company did not immediately respond to AFP’s request for confirmation.
The outage came amid a period of turmoil for Facebook, which
appeared to intensify Thursday with the announcement of the departure of two
senior executives at the social network. (NAN)