With 2.98 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the third-busiest website on the internet and has built an extensive infrastructure to support its massive user base. Since it launched its first company-built and -operated server farm in Prineville, Oregon, in April 2011, the social media platform has not stopped building new data centers and seeking new data center sites. Facebook's data centers house tens of thousands of computer servers -- networked together and linked to the outside world through fiber optic cables.
Facebook on Monday said it will shut down its facial recognition system for privacy reasons, and will delete more than 1 billion “facial recognition templates” it has collected over the years.
Several revealing findings are outlined in a cache of disclosures made to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, and provided to Congress in redacted form by her legal counsel.
A whistleblower testified that the company prioritized profit while stoking division, undermining democracy and harming the mental-health of its youngest users.
Facebook users around the world have been unable to access its family of social-media apps, including the main social network, photo-sharing app Instagram and messaging service WhatsApp.