Vincent Boland: Facebook needs a reboot of its system, starting at the top

Can the social media giant’s woes only be fixed by a rearrangement of the power balance at board level?

‘The only way to fix Facebook is to change everything at the top, including the role of Mark Zuckerberg, its founder and controlling shareholder.’ Picture: Getty

Why didn’t somebody just call the help desk? That was my reaction to the news that Facebook’s 2.8 billion users around the world were unable to use its social media platforms for six hours last Monday.

It turned out that the problem was not a global conspiracy against Mark Zuckerberg, or a hack by trolls from Ruritania, but a “faulty configuration change”. It needed a reboot.

The episode was very telling about how Facebook is ...