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Showing posts from October, 2022

Meta’s fixed the Instagram and Facebook outage

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Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge Meta says it’s fixed an issue that briefly made Instagram and Facebook inaccessible for some users on Friday. During the outage, which was caused by a “configuration change” according to Meta spokesperson Monica Wik, some people were completely unable to load the apps and sites, as indicated by reports from Downdetector.com , as well as staff members at The Verge . Not everyone was affected; some people could load all of Meta’s services without an issue, but the problems were seemingly most prevalent for users outside the US, as well as some US residents on the West Coast. Affected users may have seen some cached content displayed but received an error message about the feed not refreshing, or they may have gotten a “page not available” error when trying to load either site on a desktop browser or display. That’s not how Instagram’s supposed to look. Some users at The Verge were also able to

Zuckerberg is all in on the metaverse whether you like it or not

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Image: Getty Images Toward the end of Meta’s earnings call on Wednesday discussing the company’s results for Q3 2022 , CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a moment to address his metaverse doubters. “Look, I get that a lot of people might disagree with this investment, but from what I can tell, I think this is going to be a very important thing,” he said. “People will look back a decade from now and talk about the importance of the work being done here.” “People will look back a decade from now and talk about the importance of the work being done here” The problem is that a decade is a long time from now. And as Zuckerberg experienced on today’s earnings call, he is losing faithful supporters quickly. “I think kind of summing up how investors are feeling right now is that there are just too many experimental bets versus proven bets,” one Wall Street analyst said on the call. The numbers are staggering (PDF) : Meta’s Reality Labs division lost $3.7 billion this last

Now Instagram’s bringing ads to profiles and the Explore page, too

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Now seems like the worst time to announce that more ads are coming to Instagram considering the backlash the platform has experienced over its increased focus on video content ( via TechCrunch ). But Instagram’s doing it anyway, which means we’re going to start seeing ads on the Explore tab and in profiles. We already get ads when scrolling through feeds on the Explore page, but now, Instagram says businesses can put ads on the Explore homepage as well, which is the grid of photos and videos you land on when first opening the tab. If you’re curious as to what this might look like, Instagram provided an example that shows a large ad taking up a pretty big portion of the Explore grid. Image: Instagram Ads could show up with a “sponsored” tag on the explore homepage. The ad has a “sponsored” label along with the name of the account and a “learn more” button, so you can clearly see it’s an