Engineering at Meta

What's your plan when the power goes out instantly, with zero warning?

For Meta's data centers, we needed an answer we could prove. That's why we built Instantaneous PowerLoss Storm, a new testing paradigm that simulates complete utility outages to validate our infrastructure can tolerate instant power loss.

In this post, our engineers walk through the defense-in-depth strategies, implementation tradeoffs, and validation approach that make this possible at scale.

Read more: https://engineering.fb.com/2026/06/03/data-center-engineering/lights-out-systems-on-validating-instant-power-loss-readiness/

Today we're announcing America's Workforce Academy (AWA), the largest private-sector commitment to the skilled trades in American history, beginning with a $115 million commitment in the first year alone.

This cost-free program supports all participants while they learn and then guarantees a job for all graduates in high-demand fields such as electrical work, mechanical systems and plumbing. Every graduate will be guaranteed a job on a Meta construction site.

Learn more: http://meta.com/AmericasWorkforceAcademy

At Meta, real-time communication (RTC) powers everything from Messenger and Instagram video chats to Cloud Gaming and VR casting on Meta Quest. To meet the performance demands of billions of users, we spent years developing a specialized, high-performance variant of the open-source WebRTC library.

But permanently forking a large open-source project often leads to the "forking trap"—where internal features accumulate and merging external commits becomes prohibitive.

We recently concluded a massive multiyear migration to break this cycle, moving 50+ use cases from a divergent WebRTC fork to a modular architecture built on the latest upstream version.

To achieve this in a monorepo with strict static linking constraints, we engineered a dual-stack architecture. By building a shim layer—a proxy library with a unified, version-agnostic API—we ran both the legacy and latest WebRTC implementations simultaneously for safe A/B testing. We solved thousands of C++ One Definition Rule (ODR) symbol collisions using automated renamespacing and AST-based code generation, adding only ~5 MB to our binary size instead of the ~38 MB that duplicating higher-layer orchestration would have caused.

Instead of being years behind, we are now "living at head" with stable Chromium releases. This modernization dropped CPU usage by up to 10%, improved crash rates by up to 3%, and reduced compressed binary sizes by 100-200 KB across major apps.

Read the full technical breakdown on how we engineered our way out of the forking trap: https://engineering.fb.com/2026/04/09/developer-tools/escaping-the-fork-how-meta-modernized-webrtc-across-50-use-cases/