As Facebook and its subsidiary apps WhatsApp and Instagram went down for nearly 6 hours on 5th October, Mark Zuckerberg suffered loses of $6 Billion within hours.
This brought him down a notch on the list of the world’s richest people.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, this has cost Mark Zuckerberg the fifth position among billionaires. Now, he stands with $120.9 billion in sixth place, behind Bill Gates. Shares of Facebook plummeted about 5 per cent, adding to a 15 per cent drop since mid-September.
According to The Index, Zuckerberg is down from almost $140 billion in a matter of weeks. On September 13, the Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of stories based on a cache of internal documents, revealing that Facebook knew about a wide range of problems with its products — such as Instagram’s harm to teenage girls’ mental health and misinformation about the January 6 Capitol riots — while downplaying the issues in public.
This was one of the longest outages Facebook and its services like WhatsApp faced. Facebook in a blog noted that the cause of the global outage was a glitch in routers. Facebook has blamed the faulty configuration change behind the outage.
The outage happened just as Facebook’s Antigone Davis was live on CNBC defending the company over a whistleblower’s accusations and its handling of research data suggesting Instagram is harmful to teens, its entire network of services suddenly went offline.