European lawmakers barraged Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, on Tuesday with a litany of questions about his company’s global power, its role in elections and its misuse of user data. One even raised the prospect of breaking up the social media giant.

But the meeting in Brussels ended with members of the European Parliament complaining that Mr. Zuckerberg had used the session’s odd format to evade specific questions and just repeat statements he had made in the past. Several shouted follow-up questions out of turn, one complained that he had asked six yes-or-no questions to which he received no clear reply, and another argued that Mr. Zuckerberg had used the event’s structure to deliberately sidestep details.

Before it descended into frustration, the meeting had been billed as part of Mr. Zuckerberg’s apology tour for Facebook’s mishandling of its users’ data. European authorities have emerged as the world’s most assertive watchdog of the technology industry, and many wanted a chance to publicly grill the chief executive after revelations in March that a British political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, had improperly obtained and used the information of millions of Facebook members.

But the session with Mr. Zuckerberg, which was scheduled for one hour and 15 minutes, was set up so that lawmakers asked questions one after the other without a pause for answers. That left Mr. Zuckerberg only minutes to speak at the very end, allowing him to select which questions to address in a general way.