Facebook has tried to play down the research.

The Journal’s stories, called “The Facebook Files,” painted a picture of a company focused on growth and its own interests instead of the public good. It also published about the timing of the apps going down.įacebook is going through a major crisis after the whistleblower who was the source of The Wall Street Journal’s series of stories exposing the company’s awareness of internal research into the negative effects of its products and decisions went public on “60 Minutes” on Sunday.įrances Haugen was identified in a “60 Minutes” interview Sunday as the woman who anonymously filed complaints with federal law enforcement that the company’s own research shows how it magnifies hate and misinformation, leads to increased polarization, and that Instagram, specifically, can harm teenage girls’ mental health. The Associated Press reported that it was 'rare' for such an outage to be global.

However, there is no data as of yet to show that the outage is connected to the recent news. Some Twitter users mentioned that Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp all went down on the day following a '60 Minutes' report about Facebook and Instagram.

Messenger down today