Meta Content Moderation Vendors Impacted by Global Tech Outage

Some external vendors that police content on Facebook owner Meta’s platforms were affected by the global tech outage that crippled airports, banks, and hospitals on Friday, a Meta spokesperson said in response to a Reuters query.

Meta Experiences SEV1 Alert:

The social media giant experienced a SEV1 due to the disruptions, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters, using Meta’s term for a “code red”-style alert involving high-stakes problems with its systems that require urgent attention.

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 of our vendors’ tools.

While this caused a small impact on some of our support operations, there was minimal to no impact on our content moderation efforts,” the spokesperson said.

Content Moderation Approach:

Like most social media companies, Meta relies on a mix of artificial intelligence and human review to moderate the billions of posts on its platforms, including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads.

Some of that human review is performed by Meta staffers, but most is outsourced to business services vendors, who employ armies of low-paid workers who assess whether the posts contain hate speech, violence, and other violations of the company’s rules.

Friday’s alert involved vendor access to two systems Meta uses to route content flagged for review to moderators called SRT and HumanOps, the source told Reuters. The person said the key vendors affected were Teleperformance and Concentrix.

Vendor Responses:

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