From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

Today, five days after the story of Cambridge Analytica broke,

Mark Zuckerberg finally breaks his silence about Facebook's role in the data breach and talks to the New York Times.

It's Thursday, March 22.

It's no exaggeration to say that Facebook is in crisis, and that is a big statement.

There's a crisis at Facebook that is intensifying after the company failed to protect user data.

The hashtag Delete Facebook began trending after news of the data leak became public. People were upset.

Their profiles were sold to a company that helped the Trump campaign. Some of their anger targeted at Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.

He has been silent on the data leak at least once.

If you look at Zuckerberg, he's MIA. When was the last time we heard Zuckerberg talk about this?

It's a complete and utter failure of leadership.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg is still missing an action.

We're all asking where in the world is Mark Zuckerberg in this moment of crisis?

He's got to make a clear statement and sue it. Surely it's time for him to drop this pie in the sky,

fix the whole world dreaming, and fix his company.

On Wednesday afternoon, minutes after breaking his silence by posting a public statement on Facebook,

Mark Zuckerberg got on the phone with my colleagues, Kevin Russe and Shira Frankl.

Kevin, how did this interview come to be?

We had been asking Facebook for days about how they were going to respond.

We were just hearing nothing back.

This is very unusual for something to go five days without any kind of public comment from either Mark Zuckerberg or Cheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook.

I had given up on hearing directly from the company.

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