‘A power play’: Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica cleanup sweeps up marketing tech

Emails started flooding in on March 28. Brands and influencers were locked out of a tool they routinely relied on for years to access their audience data on Instagram. They messaged the platform’s team asking what was wrong. The answer was unclear, at the time. The founder and one of the concerned clients told Digiday that thoughts came back to a March 17 exposé on Cambridge Analytica. But the malfunctioning of third-party software companies, which were not maliciously stealing user data, was unexpected. “There was zero communication. Apps just stopped working,” said the founder of the marketing tech company, who requested anonymity due to privacy around trying to sell or pivot the startup in the wake of that day.