By
Mercy Tukiya Mutanya
February 2nd, 2024
On Thursday, two of Facebook’s top-level executives had put their papers down. This hasn’t gone unnoticed as the company’s stock lost 3%.
It is turning out to be a bad week for social media giant Facebook and its investors. Two successive events have come as a major blow to the company. This comes just in a week’s time after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined a new strategy for the company, last week.
Today, the stock price of the company has plunged over 3% moving below $165 levels at the press time.
Massive Outage on Facebook and Instagram
On Wednesday, Facebook and its other entity Instagram suffered a massive 14-hours outage leaving its services inaccessible across the globe. Advertisers on these two platforms had to face losses due in the backdrop of this outage. However, the company told Bloomberg that it was investigating the “possibility of returning investors’ funds”.
The issue was prominent across other Facebook products like Workplace, used by businesses for internal communication. An unnamed spokesperson of Facebook told Barrons that the company was attempting “a server configuration change that triggered a cascading series of issues”. Thus several of its users experience difficulty in accessing its apps and services. The spokesperson added:
“We have resolved the issues, and our systems have been recovering over the last few hours. We are very sorry for the inconvenience and we appreciate everyone’s patience.” Facebook hasn’t yet disclosed the exact number of its affected users.
Top Level Executives Leave Facebook
On Thursday, two of the company’s top-level executives had put their papers down. Chief Product Officer Chris Cox and head of WhatsApp Chris Daniels have resigned from the company.
Chris Cox headed the product development division of Facebook and also the second-most powerful executive in the company. Also, Cox was responsible for Facebook’s suite of apps including WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and others. Cox leaves after 13 successful years at the company.
On the other hand, Daniels started heading Facebook last year in 2018. Previously, he worked on Project Aquila aimed at providing affordable internet. Zuckerberg said that both the executives have resigned on their own accord. He said:
“While it is sad to lose such great people, this also creates opportunities for more great leaders who are energized about the path ahead to take on new and bigger roles.”
Cox wrote down about his departure on the company’s Facebook page wherein he notes that under its new strategy, Facebook plans to emphasize private, encrypted and ephemeral conversations across its products. Cox wrote:
“As Mark has outlined, we are turning a new page in our product direction. This will be a big project and we will need leaders who are excited to see the new direction through.”
Over the last two years, Facebook had to see a significant talent drain. The latest departure of Cox and Daniels follows other executives like CEO of WhatsApp (Jan Koum), chief security officer (Alex Stamos), both founders of Instagram (Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger), etc.