Global tech outage hits Meta’s content moderators

Although the outage temporarily disrupted several tools used by vendors, Meta confirmed that the issues were resolved earlier in the day with minimal impact on content moderation.
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A global tech outage on Friday affected some external vendors responsible for content moderation on Meta’s platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. According to a Meta spokesperson, the outage temporarily impacted several tools used by these vendors, causing minimal disruption to Meta’s support operations but not significantly affecting content moderation efforts.

The outage led to a SEV1 alert at Meta, indicating a critical issue that required immediate attention. Meta relies on a combination of AI and human review to moderate the billions of posts made on its platforms. While Meta staff handle some reviews, most are outsourced to vendors like Teleperformance and Concentrix, who employ numerous workers to identify and address rule violations such as hate speech and violence.

Despite the outage disrupting vendor access to key systems that route flagged content for review, operations continued as expected. Concentrix reported monitoring and addressing the impacts of the outage, while Teleperformance did not provide a comment. Meta confirmed that the issues had been resolved earlier in the day, ensuring minimal to no impact on their content moderation processes.