Month: July 2022

At Meta, our messaging apps help billions of people around the world stay connected to those who matter most to them. This scale brings potential threats from criminals and hackers, so we have a responsibility to keep people and their data safe. We’re sharing a set of principles to ensure that security is central to… Continue reading Five security principles for billions of messages across Meta’s apps

– Supporting a programming language at Meta is a very careful and deliberate decision. – We’re sharing our internal programming language guidance that helps our engineers and developers choose the best language for their projects. – Rust is the latest addition to Meta’s list of supported server-side languages. At Meta, we use many different programming… Continue reading Programming languages endorsed for server-side use at Meta

In 2020 we launched Instagram Messaging (referred to in this post simply as “Messaging”) for personal desktop computers. We believe that this feature will improve everyday experiences and enable new use cases for all of our desktop web users. In this post, we go through some of our overall learnings from our desktop users, and… Continue reading Launching Instagram Messaging on desktop

The leap second concept was first introduced in 1972 by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) in an attempt to periodically update Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) due to imprecise observed solar time (UT1) and the long-term slowdown in the Earth’s rotation. This periodic adjustment mainly benefits scientists and astronomers as it allows… Continue reading It’s time to leave the leap second in the past

At Meta, our Bug Bounty program is an important element of our “defense-in-depth” approach to security. Our internal product security teams investigate every bug submission to assess its maximum potential impact so that we can always reward external researchers based on both the bug they found and our further internal research assessment of where else… Continue reading Using Hermes’s Quicksort to run Doom: A tale of JavaScript exploitation

Bug hunting is hard and can sometimes go unnoticed across our industry. Building scalable bug detection methods across large codebases and open source libraries is an underappreciated yet critical effort every engineering company has to work through. Because the ideal outcome is that bugs are found and fixed before they are exploited, some of our… Continue reading How Meta and the security industry collaborate to secure the internet

In August 2020, Instagram launched a set of dynamic and fun text styles followed by animations to give people more choices to express themselves on Stories and Reels. This was the first major update to Stories’ text tools since 2016, and we wanted to share how we approached some obstacles we encountered and what we… Continue reading Building text animations for Instagram Stories

Being able to distribute large, widely -consumed objects (so-called hot content) efficiently to hosts is becoming increasingly important within Meta’s private cloud. These are commonly distributed content types such as executables, code artifacts, AI models, and search indexes that help enable our software systems. Owl is a new system for high-fanout distribution of large data… Continue reading Owl: Distributing content at Meta scale