Mark Zuckerberg has lost billions of dollars in a single day. The Facebook outage cost him about $6 billion on Monday as Facebook plunged, and he is now ranked sixth on the list of richest people in the world. The drop in Facebook’s share price caused by the hours-long outage impacted not only Facebook but also Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp.
How much did Mark Zuckerberg lose today?
After a whistleblower came forward and outages took Facebook‘s flagship products offline, Mark Zuckerberg’s personal fortune fell by more than $6 billion in a few hours, knocking him down a place on the list of the world’s wealthiest people.
On Monday, the stock slide reduced Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth to $121.6 billion, putting him behind Bill Gates in fifth place on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. According to the index, he’s dropped more than $140 billion in a few weeks.
Facebook outage along with Instagram, WhatsApp
Around 11:00 a.m. ET, the service went down for Facebook users in North America and Europe. The outage started approximately 10 minutes before noon and took roughly five hours to resolve. This is the most significant outage for Facebook since a 2019 incident caused the site to be offline for almost 24 hours, severely affecting small businesses and creators who rely on these platforms.
On Twitter, Facebook communications exec Andy Stone posted, “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.” Mike Schroepfer, who will step down as CTO next year, tweeted “We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”
While the platform has managed to avoid major Google plus style scandals, it has nevertheless been beset with problems. A cache of internal documents leaked by the Wall Street Journal on Sept. 13 revealed that Facebook had known about a wide range of concerns with its products – including Instagram’s mental health damage and untrue rumors about the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. The leaks have caught the attention of government officials, and on Monday, the whistleblower revealed herself. Facebook has stated that the difficulties facing its products, including political polarization, are complex and not solely due to technology.
