It was the only way to destroy incriminating evidence – evidence that could put the C-Suite in jail!

This is a conspiracy theory worthy of a Facebook post!  

On October 4, 2021 the entire Facebook network went down for hours – all of their properties including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger were unavailable to consumers and employees.  Facebook released a blog post explaining what happened:

“During one of these routine maintenance jobs, a command was issued … which unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network, effectively disconnecting Facebook data centers globally…” blah blah blah…Facebook Blog

S u r e…that’s what happened, on the day after Facebook insider Frances Haugen revealed her identity, and a day before she testified in US congress, Facebook’s entire system, their internal administrative system and their external customer facing system went down.

For over 6 hours every Facebook system was cut off from the world because “someone” made a small error when doing routine maintenance?  

Or perhaps Facebook’s C-Suite and board of directors realized that they may be criminally liable for Facebook’s predatory algorithms – algorithms that promote lies and conspiracy theories, incite violence, encourage racism, sexism, increase teen depression and violate consumers’ privacy…

Perhaps they needed to make sure there was no link between them and the authorized use of these weaponized algorithms.

Unfortunately for Facebook, it’s almost impossible to erase anything on a computer, especially if it’s linked to the outside world so the only way they could destroy incriminating evidence was to do the following:

1. Create an “air gap” between all of Facebook’s servers and the outside world. 
2. Erase the weaponized algorithms.
3. Erase all information/data and/or reference to data that could incriminate any of the C-Suite/board of directors. 
4. Create a believable lie explaining why all the servers were down.

This could all have been easily done if Mark Zuckerberg built a backdoor to the entire system.  

“A backdoor refers to any method by which authorized and unauthorized users are able to get around normal security measures and gain high level user access (aka root access) on a computer system, network, or software application.”

MAlwarebytes

Facebook’s blog post explaining what happened appeared plausible: a glitch in the code brought the whole house of cards tumbling down. Even Facebook engineers, perhaps especially Facebook engineers could understand this. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Mark, the original coder, got around the normal security measures and gained low level access to Facebook servers.  Once he had root access, he created the “air gap” and cut off all applications to the outside world.  Then he cut off internal access to both the commercial enterprise of Facebook (external servers) and the business enterprise (internal administrative servers).  During this time, Facebook’s team of engineers couldn’t access either backend system.  Then, Mark and perhaps a small team of trusted developers, erased all incriminating evidence – the weaponized algorithms that lived in the commercial side, and any relevant data within the business side that implicated Facebook executives.   

It was a big job.  It took over 6 hours.  

So – where’s the proof?  

1. Both internal and external Facebook systems went down – typically these would be separate entities, but one mistake somehow broke both systems. 
2. Not only did both systems go down, Facebook employees complained that their key cards even stopped working, they lost access to the actual Facebook building. 
3. 24 days after the outage, Facebook changed its name to Meta – adding another layer of distance between Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.
4. Facebook’s daily average users dropped in Q4.  The key take-away from Francis Haugen’s testimony is that Facebook knew that anger and hate drove more engagement so Facebook intentionally built machine learning algorithms that promoted controversial posts with no regard for the common good.  When Facebook, rather Mark and his small team of developers, removed the offending algorithm on October 4th, Facebook’s daily average users dropped. 
5. Feb 7, 2022 Peter Theil announced that he is going to step down as a board of director at Facebook – distancing himself from the brand.

I’m curious to know how many Facebook employees noticed that their security access became much more limited around this time  and I also wonder how many key personnel were moved into new departments.  

Anyway, just a theory…