What happened
After suffering a bad case of the Mondays, shares of Facebook (META -0.52%) stock bounced back in Tuesday trading, regaining 2.3% through 12:20 p.m. EDT of the 4.9% that it lost yesterday. You may want to thank Piper Sandler for that.
So what
As you'll recall, Facebook got hit by a double-whammy yesterday. First, it suffered a public relations blow when the whistleblower behind The Wall Street Journal's "The Facebook Files" reporting stepped out of the shadows and revealed herself to be a one-time member of Facebook's own Civic Integrity Team, which was responsible for helping to stop the "spread [of] political falsehoods, [the stoking of] violence and [the abuse of Facebook] by malicious governments."
Image source: Getty Images.
Adding injury to insult, the social network suffered its worst services outage ever yesterday when unspecified "networking issues" caused Facebook and other apps it owns, including WhatsApp and Instagram, to go dark for six straight hours.
Now what
The outage is over now. And in what feels like a rare bit of good news today, Piper Sandler just released a report (says TheFly.com) confirming that for all its troubles, Facebook's Instagram remains the "most used social app" among U.S. teens, with 81% reporting using it.
Don't get too excited, though. While everyone still kinda uses Instagram, Piper noted that after surveying 10,000 American teens, its competitor Snap (SNAP -2.72%) is actually teens' favorite social app to use. Asked to rank their favorites, 35% of respondents picked Snapchat over Instagram.
Worse news for Facebook, Snapchat scored higher in this survey than in the one Piper ran six months ago. As negative headlines continue to swirl around Facebook and Instagram, we'll be even more interested in seeing how these numbers look six months from now.
