Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg lost $5.9 billion from his personal fortune yesterday following the social media platform’s rare global outage. While the company’s share price decreased 4.8 percent as a result of the outage that also affected Instagram and Whatsapp, the internet entrepreneur is still worth approximately $117 billion, Forbes is reporting.
The outage also proved to be an expensive downfall for Facebook from a business perspective. The social media platform is believed to earn approximately $330 million a day from advertising sales, which it lost during its recent blackout.
The company hasn’t shared the offical reason why it experienced the outage, which began around 11.45am ET yesterday. While websites often suffer outages that range in duration, hours-long global disruptions are rare.
But The Wall Street Journal reported the problems may have been caused by a change that Facebook made to networking instructions for how the world accesses its systems. But there isn’t any evidence that the outage was a result of criminal activity.
The New York Times reported that some Facebook employees who had returned to working in the office were unable to enter buildings and conference rooms because their digital badges stopped working. Security engineers said that occurred because they couldn’t obtain access to server areas, so they weren’t able to quickly assess the outage.
In response to the outage, Facebook chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted yesterday afternoon that the social media platform was working to debug networking issues. “Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now,” he said. “We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”
Schroepfer then tweeted several hours later that “Facebook services coming back online now – may take some time to get to 100%. To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I’m sorry.”
However, yesterday’s outage isn’t the only thing that’s currently affecting the social media platform’s stock. Facebook also faced damaging revelations this week during a ’60 Minutes’ television interview, as its former product manager, Frances Haugen, criticized the company for putting profits over people. The whistleblower also recently testified at a Congressional hearing, during which time she shared her same concerns about the social media platform.
In response to the social media platform’s outage, Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook account late yesterday afternoon, “Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”
