Some of the numbers involved are staggering. Data from around 50 million Facebook users, roughly the size of Spain or South Korea’s population, and $50 billion wiped off the stock price in the immediate aftermath of the scandal.

From a PR point of view, I thought a CNN interview with venture capitalist and former Zuck mentor Roger McNamee this week was interesting. McNamee says that he confronted Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg in 2016 about what he viewed as a “systemic issue in the product.” “Their response was to treat it like a public relations problem, not a business problem,” McNamee said.

I guess that will be one of the interesting things to monitor here, to what extent Facebook deals with this as a business issue as opposed to a public relations exercise. And for Zuckerberg, a guy some commentators have even touted as a future President of the United States, an Abraham Lincoln gem comes to mind. Lincoln said, “character is the tree, reputation is the shadow” so let’s see how much time Facebook spends manipulating the shadow against tending to the tree.

Still, a number of people have said that Zuckerberg is an engineer by trade, he likes to fix things and he will fix this. From a PR point of view, Facebook’s CEO took 4 days to respond to one of the biggest new media stories we have ever witnessed. That wasn’t slick and his PR people must have been climbing the walls. Perhaps that suggests that Zuckerberg has in fact taken a measured view, rather than rushed out a statement to satisfy the clamouring press and public.

Some Facebook insiders are suggesting the tech giant has another, potentially more damaging problem on its hands following the Cambridge Analytica debacle, around how the company’s staff are reacting to the breaking news. In 2018, employer brand, basically what your employees think and say about their employer and how that impacts the brand, has never been more important to the success of a company.

Generations X and Y are the lifeblood of Facebook’s workforce and, particularly at its Frank Gehry-designed Menlo Park HQ in California, research indicates that today’s developers and marketers alike rate the perceived morality of their employer as importantly as how much they are paid and what stock options they have. Silicon Valley-based tech companies are constantly competing for talent and many of Facebook’s rivals will be licking their lips this week at the prospect of extracting disillusioned people talent.

Although Facebook’s stock price has rebounded this week and analysts remain optimistic about its prospects, another risk Facebook now faces is the mobilisation of lawmakers and regulators in Europe and the US.

Only the fullness of time will allow us to judge how Facebook and its supposedly ‘leader-for-life’ CEO have weathered the storm.

Nick Freer is a founding director of the Freer Consultancy and Full Circle Partners