Facebook blames 'faulty configuration change' for nearly six-hour outage - CNA

The outage was the second blow to the social media giant in as many days after a whistleblower on Sunday accused the company of repeatedly prioritising profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation.

As the world flocked to competing apps such as Twitter and TikTok, shares of Facebook fell 4.9 per cent, their biggest daily drop since last November, amid a broader selloff in technology stocks on Monday.

Shares rose about half a percent in after-hours trade following resumption of service.

"To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I'm sorry," Facebook chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted, adding that it "may take some time to get to 100 per cent".

"Facebook basically locked its keys in its car," tweeted Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

Twitter on Monday reported higher-than-normal usage, which led to some issues in people accessing posts and direct messages.

In one of the day's most popular Tweets, video streaming company Netflix shared a meme from its new hit show Squid Game captioned "When Instagram & Facebook are down," that showed a person labeled "Twitter" holding up a character on the verge of falling labelled "everyone".

Inside a Facebook group for ad buyers, one member wisecracked after service returned that "lots of people searched today 'how to run google ads for clients'".

Facebook, which is the world's largest seller of online ads after Google, was losing about US$545,000 in US ad revenue per hour during the outage, according to estimates from ad measurement firm Standard Media Index.

Past downtime at Internet companies has had little long-term affect on their revenue growth, however.

Facebook's services, including consumer apps such as Instagram, workplace tools it sells to businesses and internal programmes, went dark noon Eastern time (12am, Tuesday, Singapore time). Access started to return around 5.45pm.

Soon after the outage started, Facebook acknowledged users were having trouble accessing its apps but did not provide any specifics about the nature of the problem or say how many users were affected.

The error message on Facebook's webpage suggested an error in the Domain Name System (DNS), which allows web addresses to take users to their destinations. A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies Inc took down multiple websites in July.

Facebook's engineering team apologised as the apps started to come back online.

"To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry," the team tweeted on Monday.

"We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us."

"Apologies to everyone who hasn’t been able to use WhatsApp today," tweeted the messaging app. "We’re starting to slowly and carefully get WhatsApp working again.

"Thank you so much for your patience."

On Sunday, Frances Haugen, who worked as a product manager on the civic misinformation team at Facebook, revealed that she was the whistleblower who provided documents underpinning a recent Wall Street Journal investigation and a US Senate hearing last week on Instagram's harm to teen girls.

Haugen was due to urge the same Senate subcommittee on Tuesday to regulate the company, which she plans to liken to tobacco companies that for decades denied that smoking damaged health, according to prepared testimony seen by Reuters.

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2021-10-05 02:29:00Z
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Taiwan says needs to be on alert to 'over the top' China - CNA

TAIPEI: Taiwan needs to be on alert for China's "over the top" military activities which are violating regional peace, Premier Su Tseng-chang said on Tuesday (Oct 5), after 56 Chinese aircraft flew into Taiwan's air defence zone on Monday, the highest ever.

Taiwan has reported 148 Chinese air force planes in the southern and southwestern part of its air defence zone over a four-day period beginning on Friday, the same day China marked a key patriotic holiday, National Day.

China claims Taiwan as its own territory, which should be taken by force if necessary. Taiwan says they are an independent country and will defend their freedoms and democracy.

Taiwan calls China's repeated nearby military activities "grey zone" warfare, designed to both wear out Taiwan's forces by making them repeatedly scramble, and also to test Taiwan's responses.

"Taiwan must be on alert. China is more and more over the top," Su told reporters in Taipei. "The world has also seen China's repeated violations of regional peace and pressure on Taiwan."

Taiwan needs to "strengthen itself" and come together as one, he added.

"Only then will countries that want to annex Taiwan not dare to easily resort to force. Only when we help ourselves can others help us."

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen has made modernising the armed forces a priority, focusing on the use of new, mobile weapons to make any attack by China as costly as possible, turning Taiwan into a "porcupine".

The United States, Taiwan's main military supplier, has described China's increasing military activities near the island as destabilising and reiterated its "rock-solid" commitment to Taiwan.

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2021-10-05 02:12:00Z
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Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp down in global outage - CNA

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went offline for users across the globe, the social media giant said on Monday, as hours later it scrambled to restore the services after being hit by one of its longest outages.

The outage began around noon Eastern time (1600 GMT) and service had yet to be restored more than four hours later.

On Sunday, a whistleblower accused Facebook of repeatedly prioritizing profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation. The firm owns Instagram and WhatsApp.

Shares of Facebook, which has nearly 2 billion daily active users, opened lower after the weekend whistleblower report and slipped further to trade down 5.3per cent in afternoon trading on Monday. They were on track for their worst day in nearly a year, amid a broader selloff in technology stocks on Monday.

Facebook was inaccessible because users were not being directed to the correct place by the Domain Name System. Facebook itself controls the relevant settings, suggesting the problem was an internal one.

Security experts said the disruption could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible.

DNS allows web addresses to take users to their destinations. A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies Inc took down multiple websites in July.

An outside hack was viewed as less likely.

A massive denial-of-service attack that could overwhelm one of the world's most popular sites would require either coordination among powerful criminal groups or a very innovative technique, security experts said.

Facebook acknowledged users were having trouble accessing its apps but did not provide any specifics about the nature of the problem or how many were affected by the outage.

"We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience," Facebook tweeted about 30 minutes after the first reports of the outage.

One Facebook employee told Reuters that all internal tools were down. Facebook's response was made much more difficult because employees lost access to some of their own tools in the shutdown, people tracking the matter said.

Multiple employees said they had not been told what had gone wrong.

The social media giant, which is the second largest digital advertising platform in the world, was losing about US$545,000 in U.S. ad revenue per hour during the outage, according to estimates from ad measurement firm Standard Media Index.

The estimates were based on total Facebook and Instagram ad spending from major advertising agencies during January to August this year.

Downdetector - which only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform - showed there were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram. The outage might be affecting a larger number of users.

WhatsApp, the social-media giant's instant messaging platform, was also down for over 35,000 users, while Messenger was down for nearly 9,800 users.

Facebook has experienced similar widespread outages with its suite of apps this year in March and July.

Several users using their Facebook credentials to log in to third-party apps such as Pokemon Go and Match Masters were also facing issues.

"If your game isn't running as usual please note that there's been an issue with Facebook login servers and the moment this gets fixed all will be back to normal," puzzle game app Match Masters said on its Twitter account.

(Reporting by Eva Mathews and Subrat Patnaik in Bengaluru, Additional reporting by Tiyashi Datta, Nivedita Balu in Bengaluru, Joseph Menn in San Francisco and Sheila Dang in Dallas; Editing by Uttaresh.V, Shailesh Kuber and Anil D'Silva)

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2021-10-04 17:08:12Z
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PM Lee congratulates new Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida - CNA

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1. PM Lee congratulates new Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida  CNA
2. Fumio Kishida sworn in as Japan's 100th prime minister, to hold general election on Oct 31  The Straits Times
3. Profiles of Japanese ministers in PM Kishida's Cabinet  CNA
4. With new PM Fumio Kishida, Japan stays the course  The Indian Express
5. Who's who in Cabinet of Japan's new PM Fumio Kishida  The Straits Times
6. View Full coverage on Google News

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2021-10-04 11:13:00Z
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Pandora Papers: Rich and powerful deny wrongdoing after dump of purported secrets - CNA

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1. Pandora Papers: Rich and powerful deny wrongdoing after dump of purported secrets  CNA
2. Pandora Papers: Major leak allegedly links politicians and celebs to secret wealth  The Straits Times
3. Pandora Papers: Biggest offshore data leak exposes leaders' hidden wealth  Al Jazeera English
4. Pandora Papers: Massive data leak exposes world leaders' offshore millions  CNA
5. Some of Asia's elite in the spotlight after leak of Pandora Papers  The Straits Times
6. View Full coverage on Google News

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2021-10-04 14:33:00Z
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New Zealand abandons strategy of eliminating Covid-19, Australia/NZ News & Top Stories - The Straits Times

WELLINGTON (REUTERS) - New Zealand on Monday (Oct 4) abandoned its strategy of eliminating coronavirus, easing some Covid-19 lockdown restrictions in its biggest city Auckland, and will instead look to live with the virus while controlling its spread.

The Pacific nation was among just a handful of countries to bring Covid-19 cases down to zero last year and largely stayed virus-free until an outbreak of the highly infections Delta variant in mid-August frustrated efforts to stamp out transmission.

“With this outbreak and Delta the return to zero is incredibly difficult,” Ardern told a news conference.

“This is a change in approach we were always going to make over time. Our Delta outbreak has accelerated this transition. Vaccines will support it,” she said.

Ardern said a lockdown affecting 1.7 million people in the biggest city Auckland will be scaled back in phases, with some freedoms introduced from Wednesday.

The change of direction came as the country recorded 29 new cases of Covid-19 on Monday, taking the total number in the current outbreak to 1,357. The majority of the cases are in Auckland, which has been in lockdown for nearly 50 days.

Amid mounting pressure, Ardern has said her strategy was never to have zero cases, but to aggressively stamp out the virus. She said strict lockdowns will end once 90 per cent of the eligible population is vaccinated.

About two million New Zealanders have so far been fully vaccinated, or about 48 per cent of the eligible population.

Ardern said the Delta variant felt like “a tentacle that has been incredibly hard to shake”.

“It’s clear that a long period of heavy restrictions has not got us to zero cases. But its ok...elimination was important because we didn’t have vaccinations. Now we do. So we can begin to change the way we do things,” she said.

People in Auckland will be able to leave their homes to connect with loved ones outdoors from Wednesday, with a limit of 10 people as well as go to beaches and parks.

Ardern used strict lockdowns and New Zealand’s geographic isolation to eliminate coronavirus last year, a feat that helped her secure an historic election victory.

But a sluggish vaccine rollout and the persistent Delta outbreak this year has dented her popularity.

Aucklanders turned to social media after the announcement, with many cheering the decision while others expressed concern.

“I think if we’d been at 1-2 unlinked cases a day and/or no infections in community and no spread outside Auckland (and higher vaccination) I’d be cheering right now,” one Aucklander said on Twitter.

University of Auckland professor Shaun Hendy, who has been modelling the spread of Covid-19, said the new freedoms were likely to lead to greater spread and higher case numbers in coming weeks.

“The government will be hoping that any growth in cases that result is slow enough that vaccination can get ahead of the outbreak, before it puts significant strain on our testing and tracing system, not to mention our hospitals,” Prof Hendy said.

Political parties on both sides slammed the move.

“Jacinda Ardern has no answers to problems that she and her Government promised us were under control. The situation is now, very clearly, out of control and worsening every day,” Opposition National Party leader Judith Collins said in a statement.

Ardern’s Labour Party coalition partner, Greens, said the move put vulnerable communities and children at risk.

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2021-10-04 03:35:32Z
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COVID-19 vaccines a shoo-in? Medicine opens Nobel season - CNA

STOCKHOLM: The Nobel season opens on Monday (Oct 4) with the pioneers of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and immune system research tipped for the medicine prize, which kicks off a week of awards against the backdrop of the pandemic.

Breakthroughs in breast cancer, new approaches to rheumatology treatments, as well as research into epigenetics, cell adhesion and antibiotic resistance are also believed to have good chances of winning, experts polled by AFP said.

Two names stand out in particular this year, given the ongoing pandemic: Hungary's Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman of the United States, pioneers of messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines and professors at the University of Pennsylvania.

Their discoveries, published in 2005, paved the way for the development of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, which have already been injected into more than a billion people worldwide.

The technology has also shown promising results for use against other diseases.

The creator of the prizes, Swedish dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel, laid out in his will that the awards should go to those who have conferred the "greatest benefit to humankind" - making the pair an obvious choice to some.

"It would be a mistake for the Nobel committee not to give the prize to the mRNA vaccine this year, even if it is a bit risky," said Ulrika Bjorksten, head of Swedish public radio's science section.

She noted the pair's work could also be worthy of the Nobel Chemistry Prize, to be announced on Wednesday.

COMMITTEE'S CONSERVATISM

However, many believe the duo - who hold senior positions at German laboratory BioNTech - may have to wait for the accolade.

The various committees tasked with selecting winners for the science prizes are known for allowing years or even decades to pass so that a discovery's true impact can be evaluated before the Nobel is bestowed.

In theory, Nobel's will also specified the prizes should go to work done in the past year, but this has rarely been heeded.

"I don't think it will happen. I just think of the conservatism of the committee's choice. Certainly they would be considered in future years but I'm doubtful for this year," David Pendlebury of Clarivate Analytics, which publishes a list of likely laureates.

Pendlebury said he instead believed the prize would likely go to American Max Cooper, 88, and French-Australian Jacques Miller, 90, for their discovery that white blood cells essential to the human immune system were divided into two categories, B and T lymphocytes.

T-cells have also played a role in understanding immunity to COVID-19.

In 2019, the two received the prestigious Lasker Prize - often seen as a precursor to the Nobel.

But the fact that they have yet to receive a Nobel is widely seen as an anomaly.

"For these two, there must be something we don't know," Pendlebury said.

Other researchers believed to be worthy of a Nobel include pioneers in the field of cell adhesion, such as Japan's Masatoshi Takeichi, US-Finnish scientist Erkki Ruoslahti and British biologist Richard Hynes.

The study of how behaviour and environment can cause changes that affect how genes work - a field known as epigenetics - is also seen as a possibility, with American David Allis and American-Romanian Michael Grunstein mentioned.

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2021-10-04 03:04:42Z
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