IT-CRUISERS: Everything IT

The World's most popular Social Media platforms - Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger went down for over 6 hours on October 4th 2021. These super Social Media platforms are owned by one company - Facebook and run on same infrastructure. Reports has it that this 6 hour long outage saw $7 billion wiped from Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth as users flocked to alternative platforms. Image Source: https://see.news/users-report-issues-with-facebook-instagram-whats-app/ I observed the downtime here in Nigeria from around 16:55 GMT+1 when I could neither send or receive messages on WhatApp. Also I observed my Facebook news feed was not getting refreshed with new content. At first I thought the problem was with my mobile telecom data service, but realized I could access other websites on the internet. On making further checks online I saw a report from an online real-time outage monitoring website DownDetector that Facebook was down! There were numerous reports as well that th...

Few weeks ago a data privacy scandal was in the news which involved Facebook and a political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. User information of over 87 million Facebook users where either exposed by Facebook to the consulting firm or the firm "inappropriately" obtained the data, beginning from year 2014. Following this incident Facebook has come up with some security settings that can help users evaluate third party apps already connected to their accounts. There are several third party apps on Facebook which by way of design accesses user information and can possibly share such information illegally. Therefore Facebook has released a statement advising users to review these settings and see exactly the apps currently connected to users accounts from the time the user joined Facebook till date. The statement reads "We understand the importance of keeping your data safe, and we are making it easier for you to control the which apps you share information wi...

Have you ever wondered where all the information you post on Facebook over the years is hosted? I know someone is thinking of cloud storage! Yes but funny enough the cloud is not an imaginary entity somewhere in the higher altitudes of the cloudy atmosphere. It is actually a physical location somewhere, which might be the next building at your workplace a remote location, usually referred to as a Data Center which hosts tens to hundreds of server machines and corresponding sophisticated computer networking and storage infrastructure. Now here is one of Facebook's Data Centers, about the size of 7 football fields. Located somewhere in Sweden. The location was chosen because of the advantage of low environmental temperature averaging -30C and plentiful power from nearby hydro electric dam. One of Facebook's Data Center