Meta content moderation vendors hit by global cyber outage

By Katie Paul

NEW YORK (Reuters) - 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.

The social media giant experienced a SEV1 as a result of 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.

In a statement, 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 the tools used by some of our vendors. While this caused a small impact to some of our support operations, there was minimal to no impact on our content moderation efforts," the spokesperson said.

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

Some of that human review is performed by Meta staffers, but most is outsourced to business services vendors employing 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 of the systems Meta uses to route content flagged for review to moderators, called SRT and HumanOps, the source told Reuters.

Key vendors affected were Teleperformance and Concentrix, the person said.

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

(Reporting by Katie Paul; Editing by Peter Henderson and Diane Craft)