Facebook under fire

MENLO PARK, Calif. (NBC) – Facebook is up and running Tuesday morning—along with Instagram and WhatsApp, which Facebook owns—after a worldwide outage leaving potentially billions without the ability to like, share and comment.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on his page last night: “Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”

The outage came a day before a former Facebook employee testifies before a Senate committee. Frances Haugen told 60 Minutes she has tens of thousands of documents that, she says, show Facebook’s dangerous disregard for safety, pointing to how the social network turned off internal settings meant to fight election misinformation before the January 6th Capitol riot.

Speaking exclusively with NBC News, Facebook’s head of global research denies it puts profits over safety.

In her Senate testimony, Haugen is expected to push lawmakers to pass new, tough regulations for the nation’s social media platforms.

As for that worldwide service outage, Facebook says it was caused by what it calls a “faulty configuration change.” It says there’s no evidence any user data was compromised during the outage.

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