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On Sunday, former Facebook employee and whistleblower Susan Haugen came forward and accused Facebook of putting profit over public good, and on Monday, Facebook suffered a global outage. After a rocky few days for the social networking giant, is Facebook’s reputation in shreds?

It is evidently clear that social networks receive a bad rep for the increasing amount of fake news and the escalating toll they have on our mental health, but do these platforms care? Facebook claims to have made significant progress against hate, violence, and misinformation, even turning on safety systems to reduce the amount of false information spread during the 2020 United States presidential election. Haugen, however, begs to differ, declaring that those systems were reverted the moment that the election was over, making them temporary, and favouring content that inspires the most reaction out of its users.

If one thing is clear, it’s that user reaction (or engagement) is key, crucial even. By engaging with content, we spend longer on these sites and we consume more, leading to more clicks on ads and more money made. What’s interesting is that it’s easier to stimulate negative reactions in consumers, amplifying the worst in us, all the while boosting the profit margin for social networks.

It almost sounds like we were all in dire need of a timeout, and just like that, we were handed one on a silver platter. After it stopped working, Facebook left billions of people marooned on Monday, taking Whatsapp, Instagram, and Messenger (also owned by the brand) down with it. Something pretty astonishing for a platform that has only extended and established a monopoly over pretty much all forms of communication. The trouble with monopolies is that they can’t afford to be gone in a matter of minutes and out for a multitude of hours. The fact that millions of people, many of whom rely on these apps for income, were left high and dry is not something that will be easily forgotten, possibly favouring different ways to carry out their jobs from now on. Understandably, disruptions to their services aren’t common, and the outage didn’t happen at a critical moment, but this was so far-reaching that Facebook employees were actually locked out of their offices.

While this much needed respite allowed me to kick back, watch a movie with my flatmate and watch everything unfold, other people channelled their shock, opinions, and jokes over the Facebook crash into other platforms, creating an immense amount of beneficial traffic for them and further adding to the mishap of the blackout.

Platforms like Twitter responded to the outage with a touch of playfulness after Facebook had to communicate updates through their social network.

Netflix couldn’t resist a reference their new hit show, Squid Game, as well as taking their hat off to Twitter for managing to carry users through the disruption.

Clubhouse took the opportunity to greet their recent additions and reference an influx in downloads.

Tumblr may know it’s not a social network frontrunner, but that didn’t stop them from hopping on the bandwagon and proving themselves as a reliable alternative.

It’s been reported that Facebook took a huge hit to their profits and stocks, in part due to the sheer quantity of ads that didn’t run during the disruption to their apps and products. The collapse created buzz and incited engagement on other platforms, and Haugen’s claims have users questioning Facebook’s ethics, further solidifying the immense scrutiny and causing a huge blow to the reliability of their brand. If anything is certain, it’s that Facebook is in need of forming a coherent and unified front. Employees increasingly want to work for a company that they feel proud of, and whose values align with their own. The same goes for consumers, who in the long haul will prefer and advocate for organisations that stay true to their core values, and put the needs of their audience first.