A major outage is affecting users of popular social media and messaging services including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp around the globe. All these platforms are run by the social media giant Meta. As news of the outage spread, we learned that it affected almost all of Meta’s products, including Messenger and Threads, as well as Meta’s business products, such as Facebook Ads Manager and the Messenger API for Instagram. Most services are beginning to come back online. But what went wrong, and what can we learn from this massive outage? The scope of the outage Outages have been reported from…
Author: Toby Murray, Associate Professor of Cybersecurity, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne
When federal parliament passed legislation last week which will ban under 16s from social media, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese celebrated. Posting on X, he said: “We’re doing everything we can to keep our kids safe”. Part of that commitment involves launching a trial of age assurance technologies to determine the best way of enforcing the social media ban for under 16s and preventing young people under 18 from accessing online pornography sites. The trial will be run by a consortium led by a British company called the Age Check Certification Scheme. It has previously tested software for Australian troops in…
On Tuesday, Australia’s minister for government services, Bill Shorten, announced the federal government is developing a new digital identity and credential system. Known as the Trust Exchange (TEx), Shorten said the new system will be “world leading” and represents an “exciting step forward for Australia’s digital infrastructure”. But details about the system are scarce. Shorten admitted it is still something of an “abstract concept” at this point. However, we know it will allow people to prove things about themselves (for example, who they are or whether they are over 18) to organisations, while controlling how much information they share. The…