Facebook’s outage reveals how company’s AI tags photos

MANILA, Philippines — On Wednesday, an outage hit Facebook services worldwide as Facebook and Instagram experienced severe server issues.

In a report by THE VERGE, the outage enabled users of the social network to see the image tags their photos had been assigned to by the company’s machine vision systems.

During the outage, when browsing through uploaded photos, users will not see the actual photos but texts saying “image may contain: one or more people, child, close up and indoor” or just “image may contain: 1 person,  beard.”

The Verge said the same image tags showed up on Instagram. In addition to detailing general scene and object descriptions, the tags also suggest who is in a photo based on Facebook’s facial recognition.

Facebook has been using machine learning to “read” images in this way since at least April 2016, and the project is a big part of the company’s accessibility efforts. Such tags are used to describe photos and videos to users with sight impairments. (Editor: Mike U. Frialde)

source: technology.inquirer.net

Facebook restores service after outage in many countries

SAN FRANCISCO - Facebook Inc said service to the world's largest online social network was fully restored on Friday (Saturday in PHL), following a widespread outage that affected users in multiple countries.

"Earlier this morning, some people had trouble accessing Facebook for a short time. We quickly investigated and have fully restored service for everyone. We're sorry for the inconvenience," Facebook said in an emailed statement.

Facebook, which has 1.32 billion monthly users, is still investigating the incident, but all signs suggest a "technical" failure rather than any suspicious activity, said a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity because the probe is private.

Some visitors to the site on Friday were greeted with a message that read "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can."

It was not immediately clear how widespread the disruption was, though Reuters was aware of users having trouble accessing the site in the United States, Chile and India. — Reuters

source: gmanetwork.com

Facebook website returns to service after crash

Facebook Inc.'s FB.O website crashed briefly on Thursday, temporarily preventing computer and mobile phone users from reaching the site around the globe.

During the outage, Facebook users ranging from Australia to South Korea to India and Britain were greeted with a message saying "Sorry, something went wrong".

The cause of the outage was not immediately known. Its exact duration could not be confirmed but service was restored in less than an hour.

It prevented users from posting to the social networking site "for a brief period of time", a Facebook spokesman said.

"We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100 percent," he said. "We're sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused."  — Reuters

source: gmanetwork.com