Facebook outage shines spotlight on larger issues surrounding social media's influence

TAMPA, Fla. - The most-used social network was not much use to people Monday. Major outages cut off access to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp for more than 2 billion of the company's users.

After several hours of being offline, Facebook was back and running by Monday night. The outage is a huge hit for the company in terms of advertising revenue and it couldn't come at a worse time for the tech giant which is now facing major heat over its handling of hate speech and its impact on mental health.

For some, Monday may have been that much-needed breather from social media, but for Facebook is was hardly a mental break. 

"When you look at the billions of pages views that are served up and every page view being part of an advertising dollar. It's costing them serious money," The Symphony Agency Chief Digital Officer Chris Jenkins said.

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Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were all down Monday for several hours due to a major outage.

In a tweet, Facebook's CTO Mike Schroepher apologized for the outage.

However, it's not their only problem.

Frances Haugen – a former Facebook employee turned whistleblower – spoke with 60 Minutes in an interview Sunday night on CBS after she filed complaints about the company with federal law enforcement.

"The thing I saw at Facebook, over and over again, was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money," Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen said.

The complaints say Facebook's own internal research shows it amplifies hate, misinformation, and political unrest, but hides what it knows. One of the complaints also says that internal research shows Instagram is harmful to teenage girls.

RELATED: Facebook faces questions over teen safety after whistleblower report says Instagram is harmful

"The more engagement something gets it's a winner in Facebook's mind because that's more eyeballs. Whether or not that engagement is positive or negative doesn't really matter to the bottom line," Jenkins said.

That's why it's hard to say if Haugen coming forward will have much change. 

"Until, en mass, consumers decide they've had enough of a platform that is so fundamentally counter to their own well-being, it's going to continue to become to most widely used platform in the world," Jenkins said.

Haugen is set to testify before a Senate subcommittee Tuesday about the internal research that's come to light.