Facebook and Instagram back online after outage !

Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone wrote in a post on the social media site X Tuesday.

The outages occurred on the same day as the Super Tuesday presidential primaries in the U.S., when 16 states and one territory head to the polls. The disruptions presented a problem for the presidential campaigns, which rely heavily on platforms like Facebook and Instagram to reach voters.

The hashtags ”#instagramdown” and ”#facebookoutage” were trending on X Tuesday morning. Shares of Meta were down more than 1%.

Additionally, Meta is experiencing “major disruptions” across its Meta Admin Center, Facebook and Instagram Shops and WhatsApp Business API, according to a company website that tracks the status of its business products. Its Ads Manager, Meta Business Suite, Facebook Login, Graph API and Marketing API were all recovering from disruptions as of 12 p.m. ET.

Google’s YouTube also confirmed some of its users were experiencing problems on Tuesday, like loading issues, a blank homepage, and errors while attempting to play YouTube Shorts. YouTube directed users to follow its “Help Community” post for more details, according to a post on X.

Some users are also having trouble with Google’s Gmail, according to a company status dashboard. Users may experience delays with email delivery, the dashboard said. It’s unclear if these problems are related to the outages at Meta.

Meta’s service disruptions follow a major outage in 2021, when Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down for more than six hours. At the time, Facebook, now Meta, said the outage was caused by “configuration changes on backbone routers.

Instagram Security Risk

Recently, attackers took over high-profile Instagram accounts, including the official Obama’s White House account and a United States Space Force chief officer. The attacker didn't break any Instagram code or crack passwords. They convinced Meta's own AI support chatbot to hand over the accounts. Meta uses an AI-powered support chatbot to help users recover locked accounts, change recovery emails, and handle account issues. The chatbot is trained to verify identity through questions and decide whether a request looks legitimate. Attackers figured out how to manipulate that decision making process. Video Credit- x.com/chetaslua The attack consists of four main steps. Step 1: The attacker contacts Meta's AI support chatbot claiming to be the legitimate owner of a target account. They simply use Instagram's help interface and start an account recovery conversation. For high-profile targets, attackers use publicly available information such as display names, profile bios, ...

LinkedIn Rolls Out AI Slop Reporting button

LinkedIn is trying to get a handle on the massive amounts of AI slop on the platform. To do that, the company is testing a new reporting tool that let users flag potential slop and removing the "rewrite with AI" button it once promoted on every post. With the new reporting tool, users will have the ability to flag posts as "seems like AI slop." Doing so will "privately flag" via the site's analytics dashboard that others "feel your post may have come off as inauthentic or heavy use of AI," LinkedIn's Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan wrote in an update. The move follows an earlier update that aimed to reduce the reach of AI-generated posts on the platform. The company has since done further work to improve its detection systems, Srinivasan said, which should lead to people seeing fewer AI-generated posts recommended in their feeds. Pos...

A Simple PDF Tool Outpaced Giants by doing the basics faster, cleaner, and better than anyone else.

I am going to break down the story of a tool that I'm willing to bet you've used, but whose incredible business journey you probably know nothing about. Honestly, this is a master class for any founder looking to build something valuable from scratch. I am calling it the Bootstrapper’s Playbook. A Wild Reality Check Let’s just start with a wild fact. There's a website out there, a deceptively simple one, that in places like India pulls in more traffic than Amazon. I'm serious. Millions and millions of people rely on it every single day. Any guesses? It's iLovePDF. If you've ever needed to quickly merge, split, or compress a PDF file, you've almost definitely landed on this site. But what most people have no idea about is how this massive global platform was built. And that is where the real story begins. Born from Frustration So, let's go all the way back to the beginning. Because this whole thing wasn't born from some grand business plan or a fanc...

Midnight Web by Rahul Banerjee

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