Mark Zuckerberg ‘lost’ billions of dollars in hours as Facebook went down – Times of India

Last night social media giant Facebook suffered a global outage that lasted for quite a few hours. WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook all went down as users struggled to log in or use the popular social media apps. The fall out of the outage led to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ‘losing’ billions of dollars. According to a report by Bloomberg, the stock price of Facebook went down 5%. With Facebook stock price falling, it affected the company CEO’s estimated net worth. As per the report, Zuckerberg’s estimated net worth went down to $121.6 billion — about $6 billion less than when the day began. In the Bloomberg Billionaires’ Index, Zuckerberg dropped to the 5th spot. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates climbed up the list in fourth place with an estimated net worth of $124 billion.
Facebook confirmed that a faulty configuration change led to the outage. The company also said that no user data was actually compromised during the downtime, ruling out the possibility of a cyberattack.
In an official blog post, Facebook said that “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
Zuckerberg meanwhile apologised for the disruption once Facebook services were back up and running.
Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about,” he said in the post.
This was the biggest outage that Facebook had suffered since 2008. Users from several parts of the world complained about not being able to use Facebook’s apps. WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook are among the most used apps in the world with billions of active users.