Tech giant, Facebook, has lost over $47bn in market value following Monday’s incident where the company’s social networking platforms Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger suffered a 6-hour global outage.
Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index says the incident has seen Facebook founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, drop from fourth to fifth (with $121bn) on the rankings of world’s top billionaires. He now comes behind Bill Gates, with Elon Musk on top followed by Jeff Bezos and Bernard Arnault.
Facebook’s shares fell 4.9% on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September.
Facebook, which is the world’s largest seller of online ads after Google, was losing about $545,000 in U.S. ad revenue per hour during the outage, according to estimates from ad measurement firm Standard Media Index.
On Monday evening, majority of social media users as well as online businesses experienced major disruption after popular sites Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger suffered an outage.
For six hours, there was a blackout with billions of users across the globe unable to send/receive or even get updates through the four platforms.
Monday’s incident goes to show just how dependent the world has become on a company that has recently come under intense scrutiny by governments over issues of monopoly and privacy.
Facebook’s Apps which include Whatsapp, Instagram, Messenger and Oculus began displaying error messages around 18:50 (EAT). Facebook’s own site could not load at all while Instagram and Whatsapp were accessible but could not load new content or send messages.
Within minutes, Facebook which has 2.9 billion monthly users had disappeared from the internet. After six hours, some apps slowly started working again though the company cautioned full service would take time.
Whatsapp wrote on its twitter handle; “We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with Whatsapp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience”.
Technology outages are not uncommon but to have so many apps go off from the world’s largest social media company was highly unusual. Facebook’s last significant outage was in 2019 when a technical error affected its sites for 24 hours.
In a statement released by the company earlier today, Facebook apologized for the inconvenience, adding “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication.”
“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” the statement adds.
Facebook says there was no evidence that any user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.
As the apps slowly came back to life, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook page, “Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Messenger are coming online now. Sorry for the disruption today. I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected to the people you care about”.
This outage added to an already fragile status for the tech giants who have in recent weeks grappled with claims by its former product manager Frances Haugen that the company is aware of how its platforms are used to spread hate, violence and misinformation, and that Facebook has tried to hide that evidence.
Facebook denies those claims. Haugen is set to testify today, Tuesday before US Congress.
When the outage began on Monday, users flocked Twitter to lament how the Apps were down. The hashtag #FacebookDown also trended as memes about the incident proliferated.
