Amid Outage, Whistleblower Revelations, Facebook CEO Zuckerberg Loses Over $6 Bn
Facebook's stock, too, plummeted by 4.9% on Monday.
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Amid the global outage of social media apps Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg's personal wealth fell by more than $6 billion, a report by Bloomberg said.
The losses incurred by the Facebook CEO in the hours the three social media platforms were down also saw him moving down in the list of the world's richest people.
The social media giant's stock, too, plummeted by 4.9% on Monday, 4 October, which took Zuckerberg's worth down from nearly $140 billion to $121.6 billion.
The drop seen in Zuckerberg's personal wealth came a day after Facebook Inc whistleblower Frances Haugen accused the platform of prioritising profit rather than clamping down on hate speech and misinformation, reported Al Jazeera.
Messaging app WhatsApp, as well as Instagram and Facebook, reconnected to the global internet early on Tuesday, 5 October, morning after being down for nearly six hours.
Zuckerberg later apologised to users worldwide for the disruption.
"Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about," Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post.
Facebook blamed the major outage on router work, AFP reported.
Effect on Global Ad Empire
The massive outage that left the entire family of Facebook apps down for several hours on a busy Monday produced a cascading effect on the global ad empire that is dependent upon the social networking giant to reach billions of consumers, reports IANS.
The global outage brought millions of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger users to Twitter, which saw tremendous traffic.
According to Forrester VP, Research Director, Mike Proulx, although many brands had a "real-time marketing" moment on Twitter, this outage has widespread implications to the advertising ecosystem "given the fact that ads weren't being served for over six hours across Facebook and Instagram, which command the lion's share of social media ad revenue".
"This not only affects Facebook's revenue (and stock price) but also brands' bottom lines," he said in a statement, reported IANS.
(With inputs from Bloomberg, IANS, AFP, and Al Jazeera)
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