The social media giant Facebook has lost two major executives. Mark Zuckerberg has announced the withdrawal of Chris Cox, the Chief product officer, and Chris Daniels, the head of WhatsApp. Mr. Cox has been with Facebook ever since its start and was one of its longest serving executives while Mr. Daniels joined Facebook a year before.
Mr. Cox started his role as a software engineer and was responsible for the creation of many features, one of them being the Newsfeed. He was also in the lead of human resource and also contributed to the launch of Workplace, which is Facebook’s business platform. Though Mr. Cox has not given any explanation on his leaving the firm, Mr. Zuckerberg said that he had been talking of plans to do something else, for many years. Mr. Daniels had been serving Internet.org for five years and then joined as head of WhatsApp. Will Cathcart, who is currently Facebook’s mobile app head will take up Mr. Daniel’s position and Fidji Simo will take on Mr. Cathcart’s role.
Mr. Zuckerberg had earlier mentioned his idea of transforming Facebook into privacy focused platform and it is to be noted that these major changes came shortly after this. A major outage was experienced with Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp last week. This was one of the worst the company had faced in its history.
There have been many criticisms raised against Facebook over the past. This has been mainly with regard to its user privacy and also concerning the use of offensive content. The past two years had seen the withdrawal of many major executives including chief security officer, general counsel and also co founders of Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus.
Even in midst of all these controversies, Facebook claims that its number of users has been growing. It said that there was a 9% rise in the number of its users who used the site at least once a month, making it a 2.32 billion people. However, according to Edison Research, a market research firm, there was a decrease of 15 million from its user base in the US since 2017.