Facebook knows in the 4hrs or so after a major whistleblower story, 10s of millions of people will drop Facebook like a hot potato and never look back.
Then the story becomes less urgent and the risk recedes. So they calculated that a full-on service outage would lose less users than leaving it running.
A deliberate calculated act. It'd be interesting if they re-run this story if facebook etc will have further "outages"
personally I'd run the story twice a day every day for a week to see how angry Zuckerbeg gets.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
