Facebook has had quite a week. On Monday the company's 3 major platforms, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, all went down for 6+ hours. Then a whistleblower, Frances Haugen, testified in front of a Senate Commerce subcommittee, where she did didn't pull any punches.
The outages at the start of the week were a boon for Facebook rivals. Messaging apps like Telegram and Signal surged up the app download rankings, with Telegram's founder claiming 70 million new users on Monday. Snapchat and TikTok also scooped up more screentime, with usage up 23% and 11% respectively. Facebook's stock dropped 5%, only to gain half of its losses back yesterday.
The bigger problem
The technical issues may have been Facebook's longest outage for years, but the damage done is likely to be limited to Monday. That's not quite true for whistleblower Haugen's testimony to the Senate yesterday. She doubled down on her criticism that Facebook is harmful to teen mental health (and knows it), stokes divisions within society and is harmful to democracy.
Zuckerberg answered the age old Facebook prompt "what's on your mind" with a 1300+ word rebuttal of Haugen's main criticisms.
