It was reported that some external vendors responsible for content policing on Meta's platforms were impacted by the global tech outage that disrupted airports, banks, and hospitals, as per the response of Meta’s spokesperson to an inquiry raised by Reuters.
A source who was familiar with the situation revealed that the social media giant experienced a SEV1 alert due to the disruptions. This is Meta's term for a high-stakes, "code red"-style alert which has indicated critical system problems that demand immediate attention.
In the official statement, the spokesperson of Meta acknowledged the issues and stated that they had been resolved earlier in the day.
The spokesperson said, "The global CrowdStrike outage earlier today temporarily impacted several of the tools used by some of our vendors. While this caused a small impact to some of our support operations, there was minimal to no impact on our content moderation efforts.”
Like most social media companies, Meta also relies on a mix of artificial intelligence and human review to moderate the billions of posts made to its platforms, which further include WhatsApp Instagram and Threads (Meta’s owned social media platforms).
Some of that human review has been performed by Meta staffers, but most of it has been outsourced to business service vendors which have been employing armies of low-paid workers who assess whether the posts contain hate speech, violence and other violations of the company's rules.
Friday's alert involved vendor access to two of the systems Meta uses to route content flagged for review to moderators called SRT and HumanOps, the source told Reuters.
Key vendors affected were Teleperformance and Concentrix the person said.
Teleperformance did not respond to a request for comment and Concentrix said it had been monitoring and addressing impacts from the outage and that operations were continuing at expected levels.
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Inputs from Reuters
