PM NEWSCALL
Social media users were distraught for more than six hours Monday when they were unable to access Facebook and its other platforms, Brooke Thorington has more.
Cut 1 (31) “…I’m Brooke Thorington.”
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A Baton Rouge Democrat says he’ll be seeking to deny Republican U.S. Senator John Kennedy a second term in office come next year. More from Dave Brannen.
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The small community of Lafitte in Jefferson Parish is still struggling to recover from Hurricane Ida. Mayor Tim Kerner said this morning that the town’s housing stock suffered a major loss when Ida roared ashore more than a month ago.
Cut 3 (07) “….destroyed major damage.”
He says about 50 to 60 percent of the residents won’t be able to live in their homes for about a year because of the destruction. But, he’s taken steps to get 300 temporary housing units to the town as soon as possible.
Kerner indicates the residents of Lafitte are a resilient bunch.
Cut 4 (08) “…they inspire me.”
He says one of Lafitte’s top goals is to get water to the culverts and to the pumps ahead of any more flooding situations in the future.
Kerner says one of the significant problems Ida called was covering roadways and the like with four feet of mud, and in some cases, it was even worse.
Kerner says the mud is being scooped up by the truckload and taken to the dump saying environmental questions come into play if a move is made to return the mud from where it came from.
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Monday’s Facebook outage, along with the other social media platforms owned by the company, has many asking what happened and was the company hacked. Host of Tech Gumbo Haggai Davis says the company was doing a system upgrade and the Border Gate Protocol which acts as the post office sending you to a proper address in this case facebook.com and that’s when things went dark shortly before noon.
Cut 6 (10) “…six and a half hours.”
The timing of yesterday’s outage was suspicious especially after a Facebook whistleblower appeared on 60 Minutes Sunday night claiming the company promoted misinformation and hate speech in an effort to increase profits.
Davis says it was an internal issue and says only large service providers, like Verizon and companies like Google, work with BGP, and the six-hour outage was reminiscent of a Three Stooges episode.
While an upgrade to BGP is only done by large companies and one that causes a system to go dark doesn’t happen often, Davis says programmers are human and it will happen again.
In addition to Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp all went dark for six and a half hours Monday.
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Republican Senator John Kennedy has a challenger for re-election with Democrat Luke Mixon of Baton Rouge announcing he’s throwing his hat in the ring. Political analyst Bernie Pinsonat says Mixon has his work cut out for him in an attempt to unseat Kennedy.
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The 42-year-old Mixon will face off against Kennedy in next year’s election and contends Kennedy has cast votes to block billions of dollars to improve our infrastructure and protect the state from natural disasters.
Pinsonat doesn’t see it in the cards for Mixon, a commercial airline pilot, denying Kennedy another term in office.
Pinsonat sees it as highly unlikely that Kennedy will face any major opposition in the 2022 election.
Cut 11 (07) “…already endorsed him.”
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Louisiana-founded Waitr announced today that LSU All-American cornerback Derek Stingley will promote the food delivery app on his Instagram account. Waitr spokesperson Dean Turcol says the NCAA’s recent ruling that allows college athletes to profit off of their name, image and likeness paved the way for this deal
Turcol says Stingley has his own delivery code that customers can use to get free delivery on their next order. He says Stingley will give out that delivery code on his Instagram account this week
Cut 13 (08) “..promotional activities.”
Turcol says they also have similar deals with LSU first baseman Tre Morgan and Alabama linebacker Christian Harris, who is from Baton Rouge. He says Waitr is proud of Louisiana athletes who are starring on the college level and they are thrilled they can now partner with them