93-3-WMR Audio on Demand presents the Preston and Steve show podcast.

And now, Preston and Steve's news update with Kathy Romano.

Today is Thursday, March 14th. Good morning, Kathy.

Good morning. In the news this morning, the New York Times reports that federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into Facebook's data deals with major electronic manufacturers.

The newspaper says a grand jury in New York has subpoenaed information from at least two companies known for making smartphones and other devices, citing two unnamed people familiar with the request.

It reports that both companies had data partnerships with Facebook that gave

them access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of users. Facebook describes

those data deals as innocuous efforts to help smartphone makers provide Facebook features

to users before the social network had its own app. The Times reports that it is not clear

when the inquiry began and exactly on what it is focusing on.

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

This news comes in the middle of the Facebook outage that happened yesterday.

According to Facebook's status page, the outages started at 11 a.m. on Wednesday,

that page which called the problem a partial outage, states that Facebook had experienced increased error rates since that time.

Downdetector.com, a site that monitor site outages, said the Facebook problem affected parts of the United States, including the East and West Coast, parts of Europe and elsewhere.

Both Facebook's desktop site and app appeared to be affected.

I think you're going to see a lot more of this because the Facebook incidents had been so conglined, like one right after another, if there was a time for it to sort of pause and fall out of the public thinking, but I think a lot of people are really pissed off at Facebook now. So to see them, they seem to be really moving ahead. And they should because there appears to be a lot of duplicative stuff going on.

Well, they were writing on their own strength for so long.

They were.

There were billions of followers and they just figured this is the behemoth that can't.

You can't stop it.

Too big to fail.

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