Facebook suffered a massive outage in its suite of apps yesterday morning; According to website security audit specialists, this flaw provided social network users with certain details about Facebook’s machine learning system for sorting all the users’ content.
In addition to Facebook,
Instagram and WhatsApp services suffered several failures and interruptions,
affecting content displayed, content upload time and the viewing of images
posted by the users. Unable to upload images, Facebook displayed text boxes
with tags showing information about the images, so it was possible to see how
the social network interprets the content posted on each profile picture,
status or history.
Website security audit experts say this
practice is entirely dependent on Facebook’s object recognition system,
regardless of whether users add descriptions to their posts. In many cases you
can even appreciate the machine learning tool.
Introducing this object recognition mechanism
in 2016, Facebook mentioned that it was part of the platform’s effort to become
more inclusive with visually handicapped users in 2016. Most of these tags seem
common (example: This photo may contain cars, dogs, cats, etc.), although they
may sometimes seem unusual to users due to the detailed descriptions they
provide about where the photograph was taken or the expressions of those who
appear in the images.
“We are aware that some users are
experiencing problems trying to post or send images, videos, among other files
via Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook,” a company statement mentioned.
“We deeply regret the inconvenience and assure our users that the services
will be restored as soon as possible.”
It is still unknown what really happened on
Facebook. According to specialists on website security audit of the International
Institute of Cyber Security (IICS) the company began working on the incident
around noon yesterday and, around 6 p.m. all services had already been restored
to their maximum capacities.
