Cambridge Analytica’s acting CEO Alexander Tayler has stepped down amid a data leak scandal involving Facebook, as the latter’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg faces Congress for a second day of testimony on the subject.
“The Board has announced today that Dr Alexander Tayler has stepped down as acting CEO of Cambridge Analytica and will resume his former position as Chief Data Officer in order to focus on the various technical investigations and inquiries,” Cambridge Analytica’s Board of Directors said in a statement. “We would like to thank Dr Tayler for his service in what has been a challenging time for the company.”
Tayler had taken over the role after previous Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix was suspended in March.
The U.K.-based political consulting firm, which also did work for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, has been embroiled in controversy ever since it came out that it had wrongly obtained 87 million Facebook users’ personal data. On Tuesday, the same day Zuckerberg began testifying in front of Congress, Facebook began alerting users if their data was compromised in the breach.