Facebook’s empire is beginning to crumble

When empires crumble they slide slowly at first, then the temple walls come crashing down. Facebook is not quite at the latter stage yet, but you can hear the creaking in the pillars and lintels. This week, the social media giant suffered two blows: an outage which took down its platform, along with Instagram and WhatsApp, and an expose by a disillusioned ex-employee who accuses the company of saying one thing about social responsibility in public – while behaving quite differently in private.

Many of us might not notice if Facebook suddenly wasn’t there. But it is a different story for the many businesses which have built their model on the back of selling via Facebook or Instagram. For them, Facebook is as important a part of their infrastructure as the postal service or telephone network was for previous generations. They rely on Facebook’s platforms being constantly available. Yet in the past the post sometimes failed and the telephone lines came down, and so too Monday’s few hours without Facebook – which the world endured, or enjoyed, according to your personal view – weren’t necessarily an existential threat to Facebook.

The emergence of Frances Haugen, a data scientist who resigned from Facebook earlier this year, taking thousands of pages of internal documents with her, might turn out to be the bigger crisis.