Mark Zuckerberg could have the worst week of his life and it’s only Monday

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spent months preparing for this week. And it still got off to a much worse start than he could have imagined.

Ahead of Congressional hearings on the company this week, Facebook employee-turned-whistle-blower Frances Haugen leaked internal company documents that appeared to show the world’s largest social media platform prioritizing profits over the public good. , to the detriment of everything from democratic stability to civil discourse to adolescent mental health.

Haugen, hired in 2019 to fight misinformation circulating on Facebook, shared the documents with The Wall Street Journal, who published a series of articles about them last month. Sunday evening, Haugen appeared on 60 minutes, claiming that the company is lying about making progress against hate, violence and misinformation on the platform.

“What I saw on Facebook over and over again was that there was a conflict of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook, and Facebook chose over and over again to ‘optimize for her own interests, like making more money, “she said on the show.

She claimed, among other things, that Facebook removed its civic integrity team following the 2020 presidential election and said it was “substantially worse” at curbing disinformation than other digital media companies. , including Google and Pinterest.

An internal Facebook study she found reportedly said, “We estimate that we can act as little as three to five percent hate and about six-tenths of one percent violence and incitement on Facebook, although we let’s be the best in the world at it. ” Another discovered that Instagram harms the mental well-being of teenage girls, she said.

Zuckerberg shared photos of himself fencing and browsing his Facebook profile on Sunday, even as many critics poured in.

Then, massive blackouts on Monday forced it and the platform’s more than 2 billion users to stop posting. The outages affected not only Facebook, but also Instagram and WhatsApp, services owned by the company.

Internet watchdog NetBlocks estimates that a single hour when platforms are closed means losses of more than $ 160 million for the company. Facebook shares fell nearly 5% on Monday. As for Zuckerberg’s personal wealth, he is said to have lost $ 6 billion in the hours following the blackout.

Additionally, Facebook employees were reportedly unable to enter company buildings or access their internal communications platform on Monday, preventing them from examining the extent of the disruption.

The outages may have been caused by DNS routing issues, according to Doug Madory, director of internet analytics for Kentik Inc. DNS routers help direct internet traffic to websites by translating an address like facebook.com into an IP address.

At around 6 p.m. ET, Facebook appeared to be up and running again, but this was the service’s worst outage since a 2019 incident forced it to go offline for more than 24 hours. Hardest hit by Monday’s downtime were small businesses and creators relying on the platform for their revenue.

The problems continued to mount on Monday when a member of a forum known to hackers claimed to be in possession of the personal information of approximately 1.5 billion Facebook users around the world, offering to sell it. in pieces to other forum users.

The hacker claimed that the information included the name, email address, location, gender, phone number and user ID attached to each Facebook account.

If the information was obtained through data scraping, as the hacker claims, probably no real account has been compromised yet.

Still, accounts could be accessed if the data was acquired by the right kind of cybercriminal. It can also be used by marketing operations to serve specific advertisements to affected users.

This could be another challenge for the company, as it grapples with the blackout’s financial woes and growing concerns from lawmakers.

Haugen is expected to urge Congress to regulate the social media giant when she addresses a Senate commerce subcommittee on Tuesday. Senators on both sides of the aisle may meet the company with some coldness, with Democrats concerned about misinformation and Republicans denouncing censorship by social media companies.

In prepared testimony obtained by Reuters, Haugen compared Facebook to tobacco companies, which have long denied that smoking is harmful to health.

“When we realized that the tobacco companies were hiding the damage they were causing, the government acted. When we realized that cars were safer with seat belts, the government acted,” the written testimony said. by Haugen. “I implore you to do the same here.”

Depending on how lawmakers respond to his call, this week’s hardship might just be a taste of the problems ahead for Zuckerberg and Facebook.