One of the major stories of the week was the massive Facebook outage that occurred on Thursday. Robert Johnson, a senior engineer with Facebook stated that it was the worst such outage the site has experienced in over four years. Apparently, the reason for the outage was due to a software issue and its error handling processes. The outage lasted for about 2.5 hours for most of Facebook’s 500 million users. You can read more about the story here: Facebook Engineer Explains “Worst Outage in Over Four Years”

Mark Zuckerberg broke a philanthropic record this week by donating 100 million to the Newark, New Jersey public school system. Newark is cited as one of the nation’s poorest education systems, in that, only half of its students graduate from high school. The timing of the donation has raised the eyebrows of some critics. “The Social Network”, a movie with a most unflattering portrayal of Zuckerberg, opens on October 1st. Could this donation be a strategic public relations ploy on the part of Facebook to minimize the potential fallout of the upcoming movie?

We followed a few stories this week relating to privacy and safety issues facing Facebook and other social sites. Follow the links below to read more about them:

Facebook Now Filtering Spam Wall Posts On Pages

Facebook Private Posts Can Be Subpoenaed in Medical Lawsuit

Facebook has fixed privacy problems, Canadian official says

Facebook Testing Photo Tagging Requests And Approvals

Twitter Closes Web Hole After Attack Hits Up to 500,000

Scams of the Week

Of course this week had a few Facebook Scams hitting users across the globe. The top Facebook scams we followed this week are:

“Girl killed herself, after her dad posted This to her Wall” Facebook Scam

“OMG This GUY Went A Little To Far WITH His Revenge On His EX Girlfriend.”

Other notable Facebook stories we followed:

Facebook clarifies its smartphone ambitions

Facebook Has Quietly Implemented A De-Facto Follow Feature

Facebook adopts scam countermeasures

How Social Networks Can Predict Epidemics And Control the World (video)

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