- Wednesday, May 08, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
INVESTORS’ confidence in social media major Facebook slumped a bit on Monday (4) as its apps saw a rare lengthy outage, sending shares down by 4.8 per cent and making chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg losing billions.
Zuckerberg’s fortune plummeted by a whopping $5.9 billion (£4.3 billion) to $117 billon (£86 billion) in total which makes him the world’s sixth richest person. Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg also saw her wealth diminishing by $1.9 billion (£1.3 billion).
According to a report by Forbes, Facebook stock was under pressure from two fronts – an usually long outage of its namesake platforms – Instagram and WhatsApp – which cost the company billions of dollars in revenue.
Facebook’s last dark day came in 2019 when its network collapsed for 14 hours. Before that, it faced a blackout in 2008. The October 4 outage affected the platform’s internal systems which made it impossible for even its own employees to access emails, its internal messaging system called Workplace and even some doors at the company’s headquarters in California.
It was not only the outage that affected Facebook. On Tuesday (5), a former product manager of Facebook Frances Haugen was set to testify before the US Congress about her move to become a whistleblower and leak internal data to the Wall Street Journal. In an hour-long interview, she slammed Facebook saying it put “profits over people” and failed to maintain prevention of misinformation after the 2020 presidential election.
