Mark Zuckerberg briefly couldn't connect to the Senate's tech hearing

A Senate hearing with the bosses of Twitter, Google, and Facebook on Wednesday didn't exactly get off to the smoothest of starts.

Members of the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday questioned Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about content moderation on their platforms. But as the hearing got underway, one of those names was missing. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) announced that the committee was "unable to make contact" with Zuckerberg, to the point that the hearing had to go into recess not long after it began.

"We are told by Facebook staff that he is alone and attempting to connect with this hearing, and that they are requesting a five minute recess at this point to see if that connection can be made," Wicker said. "I think this is a most interesting development."

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The hearing did, in fact, go into a recess as requested by Facebook, although it ended up returning after less than five minutes, when Zuckerberg successfully joined remotely. But it was certainly an odd note to get the hearing started on, and Bloomberg's Steven Dennis joked, "Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest people on Earth and head of Facebook, whose mission is literally to connect people, unable to get his video feed to work is ... very 2020." Brendan Morrow