The New York Times reports that federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into Facebook's data transactions with major electronics manufacturers.
The newspaper reports that a large committee in New York has subpoenaed information from at least two companies known for making smartphones and other devices, citing two unnamed people familiar with the request. It says both companies had data partnerships with Facebook that gave them access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of users.
Facebook describes the data offers in question as harmless efforts to help smartphone makers offer Facebook features to users before the social network has its own app.
The Times reports that it is unclear when the investigation began or what exactly it is focusing on. Facebook has not commented on anything at this time.
Outage issues
This news comes amid ongoing outages for Facebook and its platforms. According to Facebook’s status page, the outage began around 11 p.m. Wednesday. The page, which described the issue as a “partial outage,” says that Facebook has been experiencing “increased error rates” since then.
Downdetector.com, a website that tracks site outages, said the Facebook outage affected parts of the US, Europe and elsewhere. Both the Facebook website and app appear to be affected. Some users saw a message saying Facebook was down due to required maintenance.
Facebook did not say what caused the outage. Via its Twitter, Facebook stated that the outage was not due to a “distributed denial of service” or DDoS attack.
