Facebook had a very bad week last week. First, Frances Haugen, a former product manager at Facebook assigned to the Civic Integrity group, blew the whistle on her past employer, leaking a cache of internal company documents and testifying in front of Congress that the social media giant is knowingly and repeatedly “paying for its profits with our safety.” Then things got significantly worse when Facebook basically disappeared from the internet for 6 hours on Monday, Oct. 4. This was the biggest outage Facebook had experienced since a 2019 crash that took the site offline for over 24 hours. Facebook has said that last week’s outage was unrelated to news about the leaks and that it was the result of a routine software update gone horribly wrong. The outage, however, affected billions of people who depend on the suite of applications and services owned by Facebook that went offline, including Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram.

While Facebook is back online and the news cycle has largely moved on, it’s important to take a step back and examine what these outages tell us about the precariously assembled infrastructure of our digital world, our global dependence on that infrastructure, and the implications of having that infrastructure controlled by private, incredibly powerful, and voraciously profit-seeking entities like Facebook. In this interview for The Real News podcast, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with writer, commentator, and legal services attorney Sparky Abraham, who wrote a 2020 article for Current Affairs titled “A Series of Tubes: Reclaiming the Physical Internet.”

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