38 posts
Privacy controls — systems that enforce retention, access, allowed-purpose, downstream-sharing, or anonymization policies — require a reliable understanding of data to function. Before such a control can operate effectively, it must know exactly what it is looking at. This can b…
Smart glasses like the Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta Vanguards need to pack enough energy to power features like cameras, speakers, AI workloads, and even a display. But it all has to fit into the glasses’ temple arms. So how do you place a battery with enough power to run a pair…
Adopting AV1 for real-time communication at Meta has been a multi-year effort spanning codec selection, device eligibility, rate control, and error resilience. We’re sharing the technical and operational challenges while deploying AV1 and expanding coverage, and how we addressed…
We’re introducing Instantaneous PowerLoss Storm, a new testing paradigm within Meta’s infrastructure for handling and mitigating instant or zero-notice power loss in our data centers. We’re sharing: how we built readiness to tolerate instant failures into our existing systems wi…
We’re introducing SilverTorch, a reimagining of recommendation systems that unifies all retrieval components for user generated content under a unified architecture. SilverTorch shows up to 23.7x higher throughput compared to the state-of-the-art approaches. It’s also showing 20…
On its face the new Friend Bubbles feature looks simple enough. It highlights Reels your friends have watched and reacted to. But sometimes the features that seem the most straightforward require the deepest engineering work. On this episode of the Meta Tech Podcast, Pascal Hart…
Meta’s data ingestion system, which our engineering teams leverage for up-to-date snapshots of the social graph, has recently undergone a significant revamp to enhance its reliability at scale. Moving from our legacy system to our new architecture required a large-scale migratio…
We’re rolling out version 1.1 of Labyrinth, the encrypted storage system and protocol that secures messages and history on Messenger. Labyrinth 1.1 enhances the reliability of end-to-end encrypted backups with a new sub-protocol that helps messages survive the loss of a device,…
The HSM-based Backup Key Vault Meta’s HSM-based Backup Key Vault provides the foundation for end-to-end encrypted backups for WhatsApp and Messenger. The system allows people to protect their backed-up message history with a recovery code, ensuring that the recovery code is stor…
We’ve fundamentally transformed Facebook Groups Search to help people more reliably discover, sort through, and validate community content that’s most relevant to them. We’ve adopted a new hybrid retrieval architecture and implemented automated model-based evaluation to address…
We’re sharing insights into Meta’s Capacity Efficiency Program, where we’ve built an AI agent platform that helps automate finding and fixing performance issues throughout our infrastructure. By leveraging encoded domain expertise across a unified, standardized tool interface th…
We’re sharing lessons learned from Meta’s post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration to help other organizations strengthen their resilience as industry transitions to post-quantum cryptography standards. We’re proposing the idea of PQC Migration Levels to help teams within organ…
At Meta, WebRTC powers real-time audio and video across various platforms. But forking a large open-source project like WebRTC within our monorepo presents unique challenges – over time, an internal fork can drift behind upstream, cutting itself off from community upgrades. We’r…
As AI increases developer speed and productivity it also increases the need for safeguards. On this episode of the Meta Tech Podcast, Pascal Hartig sits down with Ishwari and Joe from Meta’s Configurations team to discuss how Meta makes config rollouts safe at scale. Listen in t…
AI coding assistants are powerful but only as good as their understanding of your codebase. When we pointed AI agents at one of Meta’s large-scale data processing pipelines – spanning four repositories, three languages, and over 4,100 files – we quickly found that they weren’t m…