 "Facebook accidentally disables high-quality apps while gunning for malicious ones")
Earlier this week, several third-party applications as well as certain developer accounts went inaccessible without any explanation to it whatsoever. Facebook has now come out with an explanation and said that its ultra-stringent malware spotting procedure erroneously targeted high-quality applications instead.
The incident that took place on August 13 saw a ton of high-quality applications being shut out for no reason at all. A Facebook employee, who was responding to a thread on Hacker News about an app being blocked, admitted that it had been a mistake and that the social networking website was working on rectifying it.
“We messed up,” says Facebook
Facebook wrote in a blog post Thursday explaining exactly what had happened. Facebook Software Engineer Eugene Zarakhovsky explained that since the service is under constant threat from malicious software all the time, it has many automated systems aimed at protecting the platform and users. Thanks to automated sweeping, a ton of malicious apps are blocked together because of an identifying pattern. On Tuesday too, Facebook was in the midst of conducting a sweep with a broad pattern where a few legitimate applications got caught in the web.
As soon as the error was realised, the engineers at Facebook stopped whatever they were doing to rectify this error and tried to put all the high-quality apps online again. Facebook said that it took a while to put all these applications online thanks to the huge number of apps affected and bugs related to the restoration of the metadata.
Zarakhovsky has also promised that Facebook is taking measures to prevent such an incident from happening again. “We will create better tools to detect overly broad patterns and put in place better processes to verify that all apps matched are indeed malicious,” he wrote. “We will address the bugs and bottlenecks that made the recovery process slower than expected.”
While it is necessary that a huge platform like Facebook protect its users from malicious applications that spread spammy posts or phish details, it needs to keep a strict check that legitimate applications are not caught in the web of automated systems. This not only manages to cause issues for developers but also affects users who are unable to access these applications.
Intrigued by all things social, Nishtha will invariably tweet about you. When not tweeting or writing about the next viral video, you will hear her proclaiming her love to Metallica, James Hetfield, Opeth, Akerfeldt and all bands that go 'growl'. She also obsesses about ACP Pradyuman and South Park and you will always find her moving around with a book. Her focus is on all the happening stuff in the tech domain, and she won't hesitate to take a shot at some of the oddball devices that make their way to our labs.