Meta Content Moderation Vendors Impacted by Global Cyber Outage

Meta Content Moderation Vendors Hit By Global Cyber Outage

New York: Some external vendors responsible for content moderation on Meta's platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads, were affected by a global tech outage that disrupted airports, banks, and hospitals on Friday, a Meta spokesperson confirmed to Reuters.

The social media giant experienced a SEV1, Meta's term for a "code red"-style alert indicating critical system issues requiring immediate attention, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.

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In a statement, the Meta spokesperson acknowledged the issues and said they had been resolved earlier in the day. "The global CrowdStrike outage earlier today temporarily impacted several tools used by some of our vendors. While this caused a small impact to some of our support operations, there was minimal to no impact on our content moderation efforts," the spokesperson said.

Like most social media companies, Meta relies on a combination of artificial intelligence and human reviewers to moderate the billions of posts on its platforms. Some of this human review is done by Meta employees, but the majority is outsourced to business service vendors who employ large numbers of low-paid workers to assess whether posts contain hate speech, violence, or other rule violations.

Friday's alert involved vendor access to two systems Meta uses to route flagged content for review: SRT and HumanOps, the source told Reuters. Key vendors affected included Teleperformance and Concentrix.

Teleperformance did not respond to a request for comment. Concentrix stated that it had been monitoring and addressing impacts from the outage and that operations were continuing at expected levels.