FB’s Terrible Week Involves Crash, Criminal Investigation, Stock Slide

Last week, tech giant Facebook had a rough week, even by its own standards, having weathered many storms since the last U.S. presidential election when Cambridge Analytica accessed personal information about users and abused it.

The company had a devastating glitch occur on March 13, affecting users around the world and sending a few into a severe depression over not being able to surf the memes on their favorite social media outlet. Facebook acknowledged its difficulties with a Tweet, however embarrassing as that must have been.

“We’ve now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering,” read the tweet. “We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience.”

Facebook called it a “server configuration change,” according to reports in the media. After clearing up the glitch and setting off conspiracy theorists across America, Facebook got more unsettling news.

Break ’em up!

Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren unveiled her new plan just a few days before the glitch, regarding big tech players. She listed Facebook, Google, and Amazon as being just too big and too powerful.

“Unwinding these mergers will promote healthy competition in the market—which will put pressure on big tech companies to be more responsive to user concerns, including about privacy,” Warren wrote in a Medium post.

While that may not have a major impact on Facebook for now since it’s still early in the election season, other ominous news followed. New York prosecutors hit Facebook with a criminal investigation regarding the sharing of data with other tech giants, The New York Times reported March 13.

But wait, there’s more.

On March 14th, two top executives of Facebook announced plans to leave. On a Facebook post, Mark Zuckerberg announced:

“I’m sad to share the news that Chris Cox has decided to leave the company,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Chris and I have worked closely together to build our products for more than a decade and I will always appreciate his deep empathy for the people using our services and the uplifting spirit he brings to everything he does.”

And then Zuckerberg announced Chris Daniels of Whatsapp was also leaving his position.

In announcing the departure of Daniels, Zuckerberg said: “Chris has also done great work in many roles, including running our business development team, leading Internet.org, which has helped more than 100 million people get access to the internet, and most recently at WhatsApp, where he has helped define the business model for our messaging services going forward.”

Investors.com said that Facebook stock dropped 1.6%, near 167.40, during after-hours trading on the stock market.

Read more at futurism/the-byte