What happens if facebook shuts down

Facebook services that rely on the face recognition systems will be removed over the coming weeks. Ending the use of the face recognition system is part of "a company-wide move away from this kind of broad identification," the post said. Meta, which laid out its road map last week for the creation of a massive virtual world, said it will still consider facial recognition technology for instances where people need to verify their identity or to prevent fraud and impersonation.

For future uses of facial recognition technology, Meta will "continue to be public about intended use, how people can have control over these systems and their personal data. The decision to shut down the system on Facebook comes amid a barrage of news reports over the past month after Frances Haugen, a former employee turned whistleblower, released a trove of internal company documents to news outlets, lawmakers and regulators.

The reports show that Facebook is aware of many of the harms its apps and services cause but either doesn't rectify the issues or struggles to address them. In , Facebook acquired Israeli start-up Face. At first, this caused the usual jokes about how people would cope, and jibes from rivals such as Twitter. But it soon became clear that this was a more serious issue - with reports of mayhem at Facebook's California headquarters.

Sheera Frenkel, a tech reporter for the New York Times, told the BBC part of the reason it took so long to fix was because "the people trying to figure out what this problem was couldn't even physically get into the building" to work out what had gone wrong.

We don't yet know whether the issue was due to a software bug or simple human error. However, the conspiracy theories are already circulating - deliberate foul play from a Facebook insider being just one of many. Facebook's apology, rather embarrassingly, was posted on rival network Twitter. Mike Proulx - an analyst for research company Forrester - says the incident raises questions about the way Facebook brought lots of its technical operations together in recent years.

He says it made them more efficient but means that if one thing goes wrong there can be "a cascading effect, like old-school Christmas lights where one goes out, they all go out". Facebook has experienced outages before but they've generally been fixed within an hour or so.

A longer and more disruptive blackout like this one demonstrates the problem of so much of the world's communications being concentrated in Silicon Valley. And this in turn raises questions whether the working of the internet should be in the hands of just a few big companies.

Perhaps the biggest issue for Facebook itself will have been the effect it had on its revenue and stock price. The shutdown meant ads weren't served for over six hours across its platforms. And this blow to Facebook's reputation comes at a difficult time.

A whistle-blower responsible for leaking many internal documents , takes the stand at a US Senate hearing today. It is also under scrutiny from regulators around the world who have questioned whether it's responding appropriately to issues such as misinformation, hate speech and handling user data, or whether - as the whistleblower says - it's putting "growth over safety".

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