It’s not just Google and Mozilla that think Adobe Flash needs to die, Facebook has issues with the antiquated platform as well. Flash has been a serious security concern for years, but now that viable alternatives to the platform are seeing much more adoption, Google and Mozilla are taking more aggressive steps towards having Flash replaced entirely, such as blocking it (temporarily) in their browsers. It wasn’t just the users of these browsers that felt the effects of the blocking either, apparently it ended up affecting Facebook’s revenue.
Earlier this month, a security vulnerability in Adobe Flash compelled Google and Mozilla to temporarily block the plug-in from their browsers. Now, Facebook says the problems with Flash could hurt its bottom line. In a filing with U.S. regulators on Friday, Facebook said security issues with Flash could harm the revenue it collects from its Payments service. That’s because social games on Facebook rely on Flash, and they’re also the source for substantially all the revenue it gets from Payments. The company listed the concern for the first time among the “risk factors” in its quarterly filing. Public companies in the U.S. are required to disclose such risks to investors. It doesn’t mean Facebook’s revenue from Payments is about to collapse, but it means it’s enough of a concern that Facebook felt the need to disclose it. “In July 2015, certain vulnerabilities discovered in Flash led to temporary interruption of support for Flash by popular web browsers,” the company wrote in the filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “If similar interruptions occur in the future and disrupt our ability to provide social games to some or all of our users, our ability to generate Payments revenue would be harmed.
