Late last Friday, Paul Grewal, Facebook’s vice president and deputy general counsel, wrote a seemingly straightforward blog post on the company’s newsroom page indicating that Facebook was suspending the data firm Strategic Communications Laboratory, and its political unit, Cambridge Analytica, for policy violations—in particular, for obtaining user information without corporate approval. It was an egregious breach, but it appeared as though Facebook was handling it responsibly. Rather than fumbling around for an articulate response, as the company had in the wake of revelations that its platform facilitated the dissemination of fake news that influenced Donald Trump’s election, Facebook was trying to get ahead of the bad press, to get “out front,” as they say in the lingua franca of corporate communications. “We are committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people’s information,” Grewal wrote. “We will take whatever steps are required to see that this happens. We will take legal action if necessary to hold them responsible and accountable for any unlawful behavior.”

As we all now know, of course, Facebook wasn’t offering a bare-chested confessional. Instead, a day later, The New York Times, in partnership with The Guardian, published a blockbuster exposé that accused Cambridge Analytica of exploiting the Facebook data of some 50 million people. Grewal’s note, it appeared, was simply a dastardly attempt to forestall yet another calamitous story about Facebook surrounding the election. “This attempt to appear ‘out front’ is totally disingenuous,” the Times’s Gabriel J.X. Dance, who worked on the initial story, wrote on Twitter.

To some cynical journalists or techno-skeptics, this maneuvering might seem like Facebook just being Facebook—that the Cambridge scandal is merely the latest in a litany of privacy intrusions; that Facebook’s de facto response is, as Dance noted, disingenuous. But this scandal really is different, and everyone in Silicon Valley knows it. Since the story broke a significant investor and entrepreneur, who has worked in tech for over two decades, recalled to me that the incident reminded him of what happened to Microsoft in the 1990s, when years of pugilistic corporate behavior caught up to the company in the form of significant antitrust regulation. One tech investor put it more succinctly: “This is a slow roll into serious fuckery. They’re fucked.”

Indeed, the repercussions are massive in both immediate and longitudinal ways. Just a couple of days into the Cambridge crisis, Facebook’s stock has dropped by more than 20 points, which has led its market capitalization to fall by tens of billions of dollars. Senators Mark Warner and Amy Klobuchar have called for Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress. A British M.P. sent Zuckerberg a letter asking him to testify before Parliament. The Federal Trade Commission is exploring whether Facebook violated the terms of a 2011 consent decree around privacy. A shareholder has filed a class-action lawsuit. Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, is reportedly leaving the company after battling with executives about the company’s response to Russian’s involvement in the 2016 election. A #DeleteFacebook campaign has surfaced across social media.

On a more prosaic level, as one entrepreneur who has personally spent time with Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg put it to me, this scandal has likely eliminated the potential for any of the company’s leaders to ever credibly run for public office. Another person who has worked with Zuckerberg in the past pointed out that the C.E.O.’s hopes of getting his company into China are now less likely. Why would a country that controls the Internet let Facebook, which clearly allows its partners to manipulate people’s minds with their data, let Facebook operate there?