Facebook blocks API for a long time, online business people are sitting on "fire"

Online business community in turmoil

The application API is a platform for building applications for members of this social network and is a means being used by a series of online businesses in Vietnam to support advertising. However, since March 27, a number of advertising service providers for online stores on Facebook have announced that some services are temporarily suspended because the world's largest social network company suddenly blocked the API.

Explaining this situation, a domestic service provider said that Facebook has closed APIs on a large scale to review applications created by developers.

Because Facebook has a large number of members and high interaction, online business activities in Vietnam are heavily dependent on this platform. Therefore, temporarily blocking the application API is considered to have a significant impact on the online business sector on Facebook of many businesses.

What is the cause?

According to Mr. N.D. Thanh, an industry expert, closing the application API only affects applications developed by third parties, while business activities using Facebook's available applications are not affected.

In Vietnam, many online businesses are using third-party sales management tools on Fanpages such as Haravan, nhanh.vn... This is a tool that Facebook opened an API port to help with better management instead of Facebook's available tools, including more flexible management capabilities such as chatbot support, message filtering...

Data leak scandal forces Facebook to tighten regulations for application APIs

However, after the scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, Facebook had to temporarily lock the application API to review and remove third-party applications that worked in a non-transparent manner, such as collecting personal information, committing fraud, or requesting multiple permissions from users.

This is said to be part of a commitment to protecting user privacy that has severely affected Facebook in recent times. The company is facing enormous pressure from users due to information leaks that have caused Facebook billions of dollars in losses.

Mr. Thanh believes that this review will also have many big changes in the coming time, when Facebook will greatly restrict the rights of businesses and open the API portal at a narrower level than before. Currently, many service providers selling on Facebook are sending notices apologizing to customers and instructions for temporarily using the main tool from Facebook. According to these providers, the API closure situation may last at least 1 to 2 weeks.