On Monday, October 5, the social media behemoth Facebook experienced a global outage that lasted several hours. Users could not log in or use popular social networking apps such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook.
As a result of the outage, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly lost billions of dollars.
What Bloomberg says?
According to a Bloomberg report, Facebook’s stock price has dropped 5%. As Facebook’s stock price fell, so did the CEO’s estimated net worth.
According to the report, Zuckerberg’s estimated net worth had dropped to $121.6 billion, or about $6 billion less than it was when the day began.
In the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Zuckerberg fell to fifth place, and Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, rose to fourth place on the list, with $124 billion.
The outage was caused due to faulty configuration change, according to Facebook. In addition, the company stated that no user data was compromised during the blackout, ruling out the possibility of a cyberattack.
What Happened?
Facebook stated in an official blog post that “Our technical teams discovered that changes to the configuration of the backbone routers that manage network traffic across our data centres caused communication issues. This network traffic disturbance had a cascade effect on how our data centres communicated, halting our services.”
In the meanwhile, once Facebook services were restored, Zuckerberg apologized for the outage.
“Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger are now operational again. I apologize for the inconvenience today; I understand how much you rely on our services to connect with people you care about “In the post, he stated. This was the case.
The Loss:
After a whistle-blower came forward and outages brought Facebook’s essential products offline, Mark Zuckerberg’s worth dropped by roughly $7 billion in a matter of hours, putting him down a notch on the list of the world’s wealthiest individuals. He is now behind Bill Gates on the at No. 5
On Monday, a sell-off brought the social media behemoth’s shares tumbling by around 5%, extending a slide of about 15% since mid-September.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Zuckerberg had lost about $19 billion in value since September 13, worth nearly $140 billion.
Now, what is to be blamed?
Facebook attributed a nearly six-hour outage on Monday to a “faulty configuration change,” which prevented the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing social media and messaging services, including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.
The corporation didn’t say who made the configuration change or if it was pre-planned. Earlier this week, many Facebook employees, who do not want themselves to be named, told Reuters that they suspected an internal error caused the outage in how internet traffic is routed to its computers.
They said that internal communication tools and other resources that rely on the same network to function aggravated the problem.
However, according to security experts, an unintentional error or insider sabotage are both possibilities.
Loss for one means gain for the other:
The loss of Facebook has resulted in a gain for other social media platforms. During the extended outage of Facebook’s network of apps and services, downloads and user sign-ups for Signal and Telegram, two private communication apps, skyrocketed.
On Monday, millions of new users joined the Edward Snowden-backed Signal, the company announced on Twitter. According to Sensor Tower, Telegram, which functions similarly to WhatsApp, climbed 55 positions to the top of the US iPhone download ranking.
Twitter’s network remained operational, with Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey endorsing Signal as a viable WhatsApp substitute.
