Facebook’s chief product officer Chris Cox and VP of WhatsApp Chris Daniels are leaving the company, in a major shakeup to the company’s leadership team. Cox was promoted less than a year ago as part of a reorganization that had all of Facebook’s key app teams reporting to him. Now, those app team heads will report directly to Zuckerberg. Cox’s move in particular is a key departure, as he was one of the first 15 engineers to join the company in 2005 and was a key player in building Facebook’s News Feed. The news comes days after Facebook announced a change in strategy to more private-focused social networks, and as the company deals with ongoing issues around privacy and misinformation on the platform. [Peter Kafka / Recode]
Recode Daily: Two of Facebook’s top executives are leaving the company
Plus: China’s Huawei is building its own OS, Tesla unveils its new Model Y compact SUV, and Facebook’s recent outage sets a record.
Shirin Ghaffary was a senior Vox correspondent covering the social media industry. Previously, Ghaffary worked at BuzzFeed News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and TechCrunch.
[Want to get the Recode Daily in your inbox? Subscribe here.]
Tesla announced its new Model Y compact SUV, its long-awaited update to its Model 3. The electric vehicle will start at $39,000 and go up to $60,000, depending on configuration, and start to ship out in fall of 2020. Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled the car at an event in Los Angeles Wednesday evening, where he said he thinks the Model Y will sell more units than the Model 3, Model S, and Model X put together. [Lora Kolodny / CNBC]
After 24 hours of problems, Facebook’s recent outage ranks as one of the largest in recent history. Apps go down all the time, but yesterday’s issues across Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram — which the company blames on a “server configuration change” — were exceptional. According to Downdetector, a company that monitors internet service outages in real time, there were 7.5 million outage reports for Facebook, ranking it as one of the most wide-reaching outages across social media platforms in recent times. Messaging platform Telegram claims that the company received 3.5 million downloads in the time that WhatsApp was down. [Kurt Wagner and Rani Molla / Recode]
Slack is removing dozens of accounts on its platform for their affiliation with hate groups. While other social work apps have had longstanding problems with hate content, it’s a first for the workplace chat company in acknowledging and removing hateful content on its platform. “The use of Slack by hate groups runs counter to everything we believe in at Slack and is not welcome on our platform,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the removals. [Nick Statt / The Verge]
Chinese phone giant Huawei is building its own mobile operating system, in case it’s banned from using US ones like Android. in an interview with German publication Die Welt, Huawei mobile chief Richard Yu Chengdong confirmed that the company is making its own proprietary OS. It’s a sign that the cellphone manufacturer, which is one of the largest in the world, is taking seriously the threat of escalating tensions between the US and China. It will be a tough challenge for Huawei to compete; currently, Android and Apple’s OS dominate almost 100 percent of the global market. [Li Tao / South China Morning Post]
Top stories from Recode
Elizabeth Holmes was “fooled by her own lies,” says documentary director Alex Gibney. The director of the new documentary about the rise and fall of Theranos spoke with Recode’s Peter Kafka about how Holmes drank her own Kool-Aid in her quest to become a Jobs-esque innovator. [Peter Kafka]
This is cool
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
See More:
