Forbes reported that Mark Zuckerberg has lost $5.9 billion off the back of the global outage of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, with the company’s share price slipping 4.8% following the interruption of service.
The outage is also expected to prove costly for Facebook from a sales perspective. The company makes approximately $330 million per day from advertising sales, which were completely disabled by the blackout.
While websites and apps frequently suffer outages of varying size and duration, an hours-long global disruption of a major platform is very rare. At the time of the outage, Facebook chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted that the company is working to debug “networking issues”.
"Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now," Schroepfer said. "We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible."
While it remains unclear what the cause of the outage was, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are now up and running again.
