Top 5 Tech Blows Of The Week: Facebook's Loss Was Pornhub's Win

Top 5 tech blows of the week: In this weekly newsletter, we present the biggest fails in the world of technology. This week, Facebook made the headlines for multiple reasons. For starters, a whistleblower testimony from a former Facebook employee revealed the inner workings of the company, which has long maintained that protecting user safety is its priority. Not much later, all Facebook-owned services went offline in a historic outage which left users grasping at straws.

In non-Facebook news, Apple CEO Tim Cook explained how he worries for people who are heavily dependent on smartphones, suggesting that mindless scrolling is not the goal of smartphone technology. In other Apple news, it was revealed recently that the tech giant made more money in gaming than biggies who manufacture consoles like PS, Xbox and Nintendo.

Read the top 5 biggest tech blows of the week below

WhatsApp, Instagram And Facebook Suffer Outage

Reuters

All Facebook-owned services including WhatsApp and Instagram were forced offline briefly on Monday after the company's server update failed itself. The company boasts a centralised system for all its applications, which may have paralysed all the platforms at once.

Read the full coverage here

Facebook bombshell testimony

Facebook

A bombshell testimony by former Facebook employee revealed how Facebook paid little to no attention to countries outside the United States in terms of hate speech. Even in the US, the company was unable to effectively filter out misinformation and hate speech.

The whistleblower, Frances Haugen urged US government to help out Facebook for she feels that the company is unable to deal with it all on its own.

Here are the links to multiple reports: Report 1 here. Report 2 here. Report 3 here.

Tim Cook hates mindless scrolling

Reuters

Apple chief Tim Cook shared his thoughts on how people use smartphones and said that users need to stop mindlessly scrolling through their feeds, which he feels invites negativity into people's lives.

We definitely agree. Doomscrolling emboldens companies to keep feeding content to users that keeps them hooked.

Read Tim Cook's full take here

Apple trumps gaming biggies like Xbox and Playstation

Reuters

A new report revealed how the California-based Apple raked in more money in gaming than console biggies like Sony's Playstation and Microsoft's Xbox. A big shock to console makers, the report shows far Apple's app store ecosystem has penetrated the gaming industry.

Read the full report here

Facebook's loss was PornHub's win

Facebook

PornHub recorded a massive surge in its user traffic after Facebook-owned services including WhatsApp and Instagram went offline for a while. The company announced a surge of 10 per cent during FB's outage hours. This means at for each hour Facebook services were offline, the pornography portal earned half a million followers.

Read the full report here

Biggest loser this week: Facebook, duh!

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