Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

Community Tech Policy & News
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Wanted to share this nice comment from HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19393819

I’ve known Chris Cox since freshman year of college and he was an informal advisor to my first startup. The NYT article referenced in hashberry’s earlier comment includes a key quote:
“For over a decade, I’ve been sharing the same message that Mark and I have always believed: Social media’s history is not yet written, and its effects are not neutral,” Mr. Cox said in a note to employees on Thursday. “As its builders we must endeavor to understand its impact — all the good, and all the bad — and take up the daily work of bending it towards the positive, and towards the good.”
“This is our greatest responsibility,” he added.’
When the Chief Product Officer says on his way out that “social media is not neutral” and encourages all employees to bend it towards the good… you barely have to read between the lines to understand what’s really happening.
The real story here isn’t the “spin” from the NYT. It’s the fact that Facebook is hemorrhaging its best people as those on the inside finally start waking up to the fact that Zuckerberg’s vision of Facebook as a good thing for the world was a lie.
If the guy who is officially in charge of product and who has been there since 2005 can’t make a difference, what chance does anyone else have?

Probably a reaction to Mark Zuckerberg’s “Privacy Essay”?

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He was also head of Apps which all went down yesterday for unexplained reasons.

I did not think of this but since it has been pointed out now, why would Whatsapp and Instafram go down with a bad Facebook server config. They are not supposed to be combined yet and the legality of the messanger merger they proposed is still being investigated. Odd they they would all fail at once rather than be on their own separate servers.

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Now that you say it like that (I thought some high-level internetprovider/backbone) done goofed), but this way sounds a lot like someone did a big ass merge/reconfigure.

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Though oculus was caught up in the downtime too. So they could just be playing fast and loose with servers in general, putting everything on the same servers, pushing updates globally and not testing any of it first. Which is its own set of problems.

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Highly unlikely.
All the big “social” platforms are just huge front ends to data centers, engineered to withstand extreme traffic.

Something is going on in there.

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They blamed a config change but no details at all.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/14/facebook_server_configuration/