Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has fallen up to $7 billion in a few hours after the outage of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. The outage led to a major stock sell-off, affecting Facebook’s stock drop by 4.9 per cent throughout the day.
According to Bloomberg, Zuckerberg’s position on the world’s richest list dropped below Bill Gates, bringing down his net worth to USD 121.6 billion from YSD 140 billion just weeks ago. Every hour the outage continued, Zuckerberg lost money, making him the worst affected from the outage.
On Monday, the stock slide 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.
In response, Facebook has emphasized that the issues facing its products, including political polarization, are complex and not caused by technology alone.
“I think it gives people comfort to assume that there must be a technological or a technical explanation for the issues of political polarization in the United States,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, told CNN.
Social media services Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram have faced an outage that lasted almost six hours. The company blamed an internal technical issue. Facebook and users who own all these services faced difficulties accessing the service over the web or smartphone apps.
The services went down at about 9.30 PM IST on Monday, with users beginning to gain access to the sites at around 3.30 AM Tuesday.
Downdetector, which tracks outages, said it was the most significant failure it had ever seen, with 10.6 million problem reports worldwide.
In a statement on Tuesday, Facebook said that the faulty configuration change affected the company’s internal tools and systems which complicated attempts to resolve the problem.
However, this is not the first time the social media giant has faced a massive outage on this scale. Such outages spark debates on data compromises and hacks. But, Facebook said no data was compromised.
