Facebook’s CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg lost $6 billion in personal wealth after his company’s stock plummeted following the massive online outage which took down not just the organization’s flagship product Facebook but their associated apps and websites such as Instagram and WhatsApp.
As of 11 a.m. EDT on Monday, the globe’s largest and most popular social media platforms went offline for hours. The result was an explosion of mockery on Twitter.
One Facebook employee explained to NBC News that most of the company was just “standing around.”
Facebook has not released figures on how many users were affected by the outage, but billions of users across the world are served daily by the company’s applications.
As a consequence of the outage, Facebook’s stock plummeted from $335.50 per share to $326.23 per share by days end. The nearly 5% drop had a personal impact of $6 billion against Zuckerberg, according to Bloomberg News estimates.
The company has also fallen under pressure after leaked documents from a former Facebook employee revealed that internal assessments were made of harm caused to users by the service. The leak revealed that even though the company discovered harm within their service, they still pursued policies which drove profit over the health of their users.
The former employee described how Facebook actively removed safety measures which reduced divisiveness and rancor in the weeks ahead of the 2020 election. Facebook allegedly reinstituted these policies following the successful election of Democrat President Joe Biden. The employee said that she felt the company had betrayed democracy.
Facebook boasts a whopping 3 billion users worldwide, giving it more global reach than any other entity on earth.
Critics of the company have suggested that congressional action be taken to break up the tech giant.
‘Squad’ member representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) made calls on Twitter for Facebook’s dismantling during the outage, claiming that it should have been broken up years ago and arguing that the multi-app blackout would have been avoided if the job had been done before now.
If Facebook’s monopolistic behavior was checked back when it should’ve been (perhaps around the time it started acquiring competitors like Instagram), the continents of people who depend on WhatsApp & IG for either communication or commerce would be fine right now. Break them up.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 4, 2021
The social media platforms were functioning again as of Monday evening.
Zuckerberg, despite the $6 billion loss, is still amongst the richest of the rich with a personal worth of $121.6 billion.
Author: Hugo Montgomery
These content links are provided by Content.ad. Both Content.ad and the web site upon which the links are displayed may receive compensation when readers click on these links. Some of the content you are redirected to may be sponsored content. View our privacy policy here.
To learn how you can use Content.ad to drive visitors to your content or add this service to your site, please contact us at [email protected].
Family-Friendly Content
Website owners select the type of content that appears in our units. However, if you would like to ensure that Content.ad always displays family-friendly content on this device, regardless of what site you are on, check the option below. Learn More
These content links are provided by Content.ad. Both Content.ad and the web site upon which the links are displayed may receive compensation when readers click on these links. Some of the content you are redirected to may be sponsored content. View our privacy policy here.
To learn how you can use Content.ad to drive visitors to your content or add this service to your site, please contact us at [email protected].
Family-Friendly Content
Website owners select the type of content that appears in our units. However, if you would like to ensure that Content.ad always displays family-friendly content on this device, regardless of what site you are on, check the option below. Learn More
