Facebook staff followed CNN camera crew to the bathroom over fears they would spy after the worst scandal in its history

CNN

Mark Zuckerberg interviewed by CNN after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke.

• An investigation by Wired reveals how Facebook employees were asked to monitor a CNN camera crew during an interview with Mark Zuckerberg after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke.
• These employees were told to follow the crew to the bathroom and treated them as "potential spies" during the encounter, Wired wrote.
• Facebook said this was not company protocol.
• Visit BusinessInsider.com for more stories.

A bombshell report from Wired, investigating 15 months from hell for Facebook, reveals how the company reacted to the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal in March 2018.

According to Wired, Facebook descended into complete chaos after former Cambridge Analytica employee, Christopher Wylie, blew the whistle on a data breach that Facebook said impacted 87 million users.

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It took Facebook five days to properly respond to these reports.

"We had hundreds of reporters flooding our inboxes, and we had nothing to tell them," a member of the communications team at that time, told Wired. "I remember walking to one of the cafeterias and overhearing other Facebookers say, 'Why aren't we saying anything? Why is nothing happening?'"

Read more: Instagram's cofounder worried that Mark Zuckerberg was behaving like Trump to get him to quit, blockbuster report reveals

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, admitted to Wired that those five days "were very, very long" and said that the company's lack of response was a mistake.

Eventually, Facebook offered CNN a television interview with CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Wired said Facebook snubbed CBS and PBS and gave the interview to Laurie Segall, who comms executives "trusted to be reasonably kind."

During the interview, a video of which is below, Zuckerberg apologized to users for the first time.

But the company was still on edge at this time. So much so, that one former communications official told Wired that they were required to monitor the CNN camera crew at all times, even when they went to the bathroom. "The network's camera crews were treated like potential spies," Wired wrote.

Facebook did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment, but told Wired that this is not company protocol.

Read Wired's full report here.