This article comes from Phoenix Technology , author: Xiao Yu
With the spread of the new crown pneumonia epidemic around the world, people around the world are required to stay home, and voice call calls on Facebook-owned apps have more than doubled.
In many countries, the volume of messages on Facebook and its picture-sharing app Instagram has surged by more than 50%, and group talk time in Italy has increased by more than 1000%. People are frantically gathering information on the outbreak and are constantly clicking on the outbreak news on Facebook.
The surge in traffic has overwhelmed Facebook
Within Facebook, the surge in traffic means they are facing increasing technical pressure.
“We just want to try to maintain normal business operations.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg) Said in an interview.
As airlines, hotels, restaurants, and other companies struggle to survive during the outbreak, Facebook is struggling to deal with the adverse effects of the outbreak. But unlike other companies, the Silicon Valley giant is suffering from the epidemic in a different way: the company ’s service usage has skyrocketed .
Soaring usage and the arrival of a large number of new users are squeezing the Facebook system, and unfortunately, 45,000 Facebook employees are working remotely from home for the first time due to the outbreak. While Facebook works hard to keep user data safe, its reviewers who screen posts need to do this at home. What’s more, Facebook has added a workload to itself: promises to do moreLimit false information on the platform.
Time of stress test
This is a stress test moment for Facebook. For years, Facebook has been responding to criticisms for privacy violations and harmful content, but now it has the opportunity to change that perception and be seen as a necessary communication and information tool during the outbreak.
“Across the industry, the increase in usage caused by the epidemic is unprecedented, and we are setting new usage records almost every day,” said Alex Schultz, Facebook ’s two vice presidents of infrastructure business (Alex Schultz) and Jay Parik (Jay Parikh) said on Tuesday, “Given that most of our employees are currently working from home, maintaining service stability in the face of a surge in usage is more challenging than ever.
Zuckerberg said that the Facebook network did not completely collapse because the biggest impact of the outbreak and isolation measures was limited to a few areas where the company operates. For example, in China, where the outbreak first occurred, Facebook services were not yet available.
Empty Facebook Office
He explained that those most concentrated people who use Facebook services at home during peak hours are also spread out due to jet lag, avoiding a surge in traffic.
“This is really a big technical challenge,” Zuckerberg said. “ Our basicI was trying to prepare everything we could do. Zuckerberg said Facebook has mobilized engineers to ensure that the company has enough computing power and sufficient support to cope with the surge in usage. < / p>
Work from home unprepared
This response is also made more difficult by Facebook employees working from home. In the past, Facebook discouraged employees from working from home.
For a long time, Facebook executives have been advocating within the company: face-to-face meetings and on-site collaboration are the keys to Facebook’s success. Facebook values employees’ personal involvement in the conversation, so much so that they often ask employees in offices in Singapore and New York to go to their headquarters in Menlo Park, California for quarterly meetings.
According to four Facebook employees, this tradition of the company has made it particularly difficult for them to transition to working from home. To maintain communication, Facebook employees were told to use video conferencing platform BlueJeans. However, they quickly discovered that the video call was stuck or the video quality was so poor that it was impossible to tell who was talking. Many employees have switched to Apple’s video calling app FaceTime, Google Hangouts and video conferencing platform Zoom. According to two employees, some employees even developed their own version of the video conference platform.
Then the problems came one after the other. Two days after working from home, some Facebook managers started sending a message to the engineering team: limit gossip on work message boards.
Facebook design project manager Kate has a remote meeting at home
Facebook employees have been setting records on these message boards, according to an employeeSpeed message. Some employees are sharing tips and great ways to set up a home office, others are sharing links to farming at home, buying ancestral seeds, and others are introducing instructions for self-made masks.
Other troubles followed. Last week, a malfunction within the Facebook system caused thousands of posts from mainstream media such as Politico, the Sydney Morning Herald and the like to be marked as spam and deleted. It took Facebook a day to correct the error because engineers had difficulty communicating the cause of the failure and how to fix it in the case of remote work.
As Facebook rushed to fix the problem, rumors about the source of the problem began to spread among Facebook users. Many users have accused Facebook of blocking user speech. Inside Facebook, managers believe that, although this is a routine fault, the time it takes to fix it is unusual.
Zuckerberg said last week: “This is just a technical failure, and we are still reflecting to understand the ins and outs of the failure so that we can learn from it.”
No one has reviewed it
Working from home also makes Facebook post review more difficult. This month, Facebook gave its global contract army of external contractors a paid vacation. More than 15,000 of these contractors are responsible for selecting posts, pictures and videos that appear on Facebook services daily to remove sensitive, explicit or hateful content.
As the epidemic spread, contract workers were asked not to go to the office to work. They are exposed to a network protected by a virtual firewall designed to protect user privacy. But in many contract workers’ homes, they do not have the same technical setup.
Facebook is still trying to figure out how to keep contractors working. Currently, Facebook relies on full-time employees to review content, but these full-time employees have not received training and have no time to review posts themselves.
According to an employee, it is for this reason that Facebook now only requires employees to delete the most sensitive and dangerous posts. Facebook also told employees that it will rely more on the artificial intelligence (AI) system to mark and delete posts.
“I doFor other categories of posts that may be less urgent or extreme, it is reasonable to use an AI system to review them. During our adjustment, the efficiency of the review may be lower in the short term. “Said Zuckerberg.
Impaired advertising revenue
Although the use of Facebook services is soaring, this cannot be translated into financial gains. Most of the traffic growth occurs on Facebook messaging services, such as WhatsApp, Messenger, and only generates relatively little revenue. Although more people are using Facebook’s stream and story feature, the company says it can’t survive the overall decline in advertising spending.
“Like many companies around the world, our business is being negatively affected,” said Schultz and Parrick. “In countries where strong measures are taken to slow the spread of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, we are seeing a decline in advertising . “
Zuckerberg said that Facebook is doing its best to prepare for the next few weeks because he doesn’t think the problem will soon decrease.
“I have never encountered anything like this before,” he said.
This article comes from Phoenix Technology , author: Xiao Yu