While Facebook recovered from a massive outage the social media giant suffered earlier this week, news has come in that the social media giant is facing a criminal investigation overseen by prosecutors with the United States attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York, The New York Times reports.
According to the newspaper, a grand jury in New York has “subpoenaed records from at least two prominent makers of smartphones and other devices, according to two people who were familiar with the requests and who insisted on anonymity to discuss confidential legal matters”.
The NYT also pointed out that it’s not immediately clear when the grand jury inquiry began or what exactly it is focusing on.
Meanwhile, Facebook has announced the departure of the corporation's chief product officer, Chris Cox, and the head of WhatsApp, Chris Daniels, amid speculation that this move was caused by internal disagreements and unease over increasing international criticism of Facebook's conduct.
READ MORE: Chris Cox Leaves Facebook Amidst Global Scrutiny of Company’s Practices
Things took a turn for the worse for Facebook last year, when the company found itself under scrutiny from the US Federal Trade Commission over a scandal involving UK political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica which harvested personal data of about 87 million social media giant’s users.
The UK government has also recently labeled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a "digital gangster" and issued a call for an independent regulatory body to be established that can mete out fines to social media giants, namely Facebook, for not filtering out what they call "harmful content."
READ MORE: Skint: Mark Zuckerberg's Wealth Shrinks $8.7bn, Falls to #8 on Forbes' Rich List
As a result, Zuckerberg ended up being knocked to eighth place on Forbes' 33rd annual 2019 list of billionaires, thus losing the title of the world’s fourth richest person.