As Facebook stock plummets today, take a look back at these wild stories from the stretch that changed the company forever. (From 2019)
in a call to investors. The numbers were not going to be good; Facebook’s user base had grown more slowly than ever, and revenue growth was taking a huge hit from the company’s investments in hardening the platform against abuse. But in advance of the call, the company’s leaders were nursing an additional concern: how to put Instagram in its place.
The tensions didn’t let up. In the middle of August, Facebook prototyped a location-tracking service inside of Instagram, the kind of privacy intrusion that Instagram’s management team had long resisted. In August, a hamburger menu appeared. “It felt very personal,” says a senior Instagram employee who spent the month implementing the changes.
And so, on a Monday morning, Systrom and Krieger went into Chris Cox’s office and told him the news. Systrom and Krieger then notified their team about the decision. Somehow the information reached Mike Isaac, a reporter at, before it reached the communications teams for either Facebook or Instagram. The story appeared online a few hours later, as Instagram’s head of communications was on a flight circling above New York City., Systrom and Krieger decided to play nice.
If that was the plan, it worked to perfection. Soon Facebook’s internal message boards were lighting up with employees mortified at what Kaplan had done. Management’s initial response was limp and lame: A communications officer told the staff that Kaplan attended the hearing as part of a planned day off in his personal capacity. That wasn’t a good move. Someone visited the human resources portal and noted that he hadn’t filed to take the day off.
In the days after the hearings, Facebook organized small group discussions, led by managers, in which 10 or so people got together to discuss the issue. There were tears, grievances, emotions, debate. “It was a really bizarre confluence of a lot of issues that were popped in the zit that was the SCOTUS hearing,” one participant says. Kaplan, though, seemed to have moved on. The day after his appearance on the conference call, he hosted a party to celebrate Kavanaugh’s lifetime appointment.
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