Facebook, Instagram sites crash after whistleblower details company prioritizes profit over safety

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Less than a day after a report aired on “60 Minutes” from a whistleblower detailed company practices that prioritized profits over safety, both Facebook and Instagram went down.

Users began running into issues accessing both of the social media giant’s websites just before 11 a.m. on Monday. The company’s What’s App was also reportedly experiencing issues.

Francis Haugen, a former data scientist at Facebook, kept her identity a secret when she filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission against Facebook and shared internal Facebook documents with The Wall Street Journal.

Last night, Haugen was revealed as the whistleblower during a report on “60 Minutes” and Haugen said she’ll testify to congress that Facebook has deceived regulators and the public about its monitoring of hate speech and misinformation.

She said on “60 Minutes” that Facebook “is choosing profit over safety.

Haugen is a native of Iowa City and 2002 graduate of West High School, Radio Iowa reported Monday, and her website says her parents are professors. Haugen has an electrical and computer engineering degree from Olin College and a Harvard MBA. She worked at Google and Yelp before she was hired at Facebook in 2019. She resigned from Facebook in May of this year.

A spokesman for Facebook told CNN the social media platform reflects the good, the bad and the ugly of humanity and Facebook is trying to mitigate the bad and amplify the good.

Many users went to Twitter to share their thoughts.