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Procon-SP fines Facebook R$11 million for falling on WhatsApp; company disputes

Procon-SP fined Facebook more than R$ 11 million for the global fall in the WhatsApp service that took place in October. The agency accuses the company of poor service provision. The exact amount of the fine is BRL 11,286,557.54.

When contacted, Meta (Facebook’s new name), said that it disagrees with the decision of Procon-SP and that it will provide clarifications. “We disagree with the decision of Procon-SP to fine Facebook Brasil. Meta invests in technology and people to keep its services free and running, and to make its systems increasingly resilient. We will present our defense and we trust that our clarifications will be accepted by Procon-SP”, says a spokesperson for Facebook in Brazil.

Remains global

On October 4th of this year, the services of WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger – all from Facebook – stopped working around 12:30 pm and only started to return between six and seven hours later. The drop was global and yielded an apology from the company. “Our sincere apologies to everyone affected by the disruption of Facebook services at this time. We are experiencing problems in our networks and our teams are working to resolve this situation as soon as possible”, read the statement signed by Mike Schroepfer, CTO of the company.

With the incident, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook and the sixth-richest man in the world, he lost $5.9 billion of his fortune as his company’s share price dropped nearly 5% on the Nasdaq, the New York technology exchange.

The blackout may have been what caused most financial losses for service providers, entrepreneurs, small and large companies and markets of all types and sizes, since, in Brazil alone, there are about 5 million WhatsApp Business accounts, division created for those doing business through the app. “Today, more than 175 million people exchange messages with a WhatsApp Business account daily. And more than 40 million people access a catalog of companies in the app, with more than 13 million in Brazil alone”, announced the app, in a statement, in June.

The next day, in a statement, Facebook said that there was a configuration failure in the internal network. “It was a problem in the system that makes the routes so that the internet knows how to reach social networks.” At the same time, the company’s own internal configuration did not work. As the entire base of applications has the same “datacenters” – or servers – all services shared the same system that had the failure, causing the generalized downfall.

*With information from Caroline Figueiredo

Reference: CNN Brasil

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