The impact of the outage of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp is already unraveling. The first one was the valuation of Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth. Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, saw more than $6 billion wiped off his wealth.
As a result, Zuckerberg has dropped down the pecking order of the world’s richest people, after a whistleblower came forward and outages took Facebook Inc.’s flagship products offline.
A selloff sent the social-media giant’s stock plummeting 4.9% on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September.
The stock slide on Monday sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to $121.6 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He’s down from almost $140 billion in a matter of weeks, according to the index.
The outage began around 4:40 PM Tuesday, Nigerian time and led to widespread problems for the company. It was Facebook’s worst outage since 2019 when the site was down for more than 24 hours.
On what happened, Facebook said in a blog that the six-hour outage that took it offline along with Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp, and OculusVR was the result of a configuration change to its routers — not of a hack or attempt to get at user data.
