 of Facebook, fell by nearly $7 billion in a few hours after the company’s flagship products collapsed.){kind=link}
The net worth of Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Facebook, fell by nearly $7 billion in a few hours after the company’s flagship products collapsed.
According to Bloomberg, a selloff plummeted Facebook’s stock around 5 percent on Monday.
The stock slide dropped Zuckerberg’s worth to $128 billion on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
On Sunday, a whistleblower accused Facebook of repeatedly prioritizing profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation. The firm owns Instagram and WhatsApp.
“Strange that hours after a whistleblower calls out Facebook saying they engaged in a ‘betrayal of democracy’ that Facebook and other companies it owns are totally down.” Former US President Donald Trump tweeted on Monday. “I’m sure it’s a coincidence.”
#Facebookdown and Whatsapp have become trending on Twitter as the world sees a night with only one large active social media platform out of the top four used in Israel, Whatsapp, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
A similar outage at cloud company Akamai Technologies Inc took down multiple websites in July.
Security experts tracking the situation said the outage could have been triggered by a configuration error, which could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible.
An outside hack was viewed as less likely. A massive denial-of-service attack that could overwhelm one of the world’s most popular sites, on the other hand, would require either coordination among powerful criminal groups or a very innovative technique.
Facebook acknowledged users were having trouble accessing its apps but did not provide any specifics about the nature of the problem or how many were affected by the outage.
“We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” Facebook said.
Shares of Facebook, which has nearly 2 billion daily active users, fell 5.5% in afternoon trading on Monday, inching towards its worst day in nearly a year.
Downdetector – which only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform – showed there were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram. The outage might be affecting a larger number of users.
Meanwhile, the social-media giant’s instant messaging platform WhatsApp was also down for over 35,000 users, while Messenger was down for nearly 9,800 users.
Facebook has experienced similar widespread outages with its suite of apps this year in March and July.
Several users using their Facebook credentials to log in to third-party apps such as Pokemon Go and Match Masters were also facing issues.
“If your game isn’t running as usual please note that there’s been an issue with Facebook login servers and the moment this gets fixed all will be back to normal,” puzzle game app Match Masters said on its Twitter account.
The outage, which hit the social media giant’s platforms minutes before noon, comes a day after a Facebook whistleblower accused the firm of repeatedly prioritizing profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation, and said her lawyers have filed at least eight complaints with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The complaint has led to two members of the European parliament calling for an investigation into the allegations.