Internet / News

MTN subscribers lament service outage

Some MTN customers are currently experiencing service outage and are unable to connect with loved ones and business associates in parts of the country, The PUNCH has learnt.

Our correspondent gathered that the customers were unable to use the mobile network operator’s call, data and SMS services.

“Emergency calls only” showed on the screens of MTN users our correspondent spoke with as of the time of filing this report at 04:30pm on Saturday.

The users told our correspondent that they started experiencing the outage around 2:30pm on Saturday.

Some of the users, who also subscribed to other telecom service providers, have since switched over in the interim to link up with friends and family.

Some MTN users have also gone on social media to lament their frustration.

@kessyl tweeted, “MTN network completely off in Abuja…What is happening please?…

Internet / News

We gained over 70m new users during Facebook outage — Telegram

Messaging app Telegram gained over 70 million new users during Monday’s Facebook outage, its founder, Pavel Durov, said on Tuesday, as people worldwide were left without key messaging services for nearly six hours, Reuters has reported.

Facebook blamed its outage, which kept its 3.5 billion users from accessing services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, on a faulty configuration change.

“The daily growth rate of Telegram exceeded the norm by an order of magnitude, and we welcomed over 70 million refugees from other platforms in one day,” Durov wrote on his Telegram channel.

Durov said some users in the Americas may have experienced slower speeds as millions rushed to sign up at the same time, but that the service worked as usual for the majority.

EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said the outage demonstrated the repercussions of relying on just a few big players and underscored the need for more rivals.

Russia said the incident showed Moscow was right to develop its own sovereign internet platforms and social networks.

WhatsApp’s nearly six-hour-long outage on Monday hit trading of assets from cryptocurrencies to Russian oil, market players said, although a quick shift to alternative platforms such as Telegram limited severe disruption.…

Foreign / Internet / News

As WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram return, Zuckerberg loses $6b

Facebook founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has reduced by more than $6 billion in a few hours, knocking him down a notch on the list of the world’s richest people.

The drastic reduction in his net worth was largely due to a revelation by a whistleblower and also outages that affected Facebook Inc’s flagship products.

The flagship products include Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.

According to a report by Yahoo Finance, a selloff sent the social-media giant’s stock plummeting 4.9 per cent on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15 per cent since mid-September. The stock slide on Monday sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to $121.6 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

He’s down from almost $140 billion in a matter of weeks, according to the index.

On September 13, the Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of stories based on a cache of internal documents, revealing that Facebook knew about a wide range of problems with its products — such as Instagram’s harm to teenage girls’ mental health and misinformation about the January 6 Capitol riots — while downplaying the issues in public.

The reports have drawn the attention of government officials.

And on Monday the whistleblower revealed herself.

In an explosive 60 Minutes interview that aired in the United States on Sunday, data scientist, Frances Haugen, a former employee in Facebook’s civic integrity unit, revealed that she was the source of the internal documents and research showing the company knew of the harmful effects caused by its platforms.

According to DW, the company’s own findings include knowledge of the harms Instagram caused teen girls’ body image perceptions and a two-tier system of penalties for misuse of its platforms, one for celebrities and the other for the public.

“I’ve seen a bunch of social networks and it was substantially worse at Facebook than what I had seen before,” Haugen told “60 Minutes.”

“The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and …