Mark Zuckerberg’s Net Worth Drops $7 Billion After Facebook Outage

Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth dropped by 7 billion US dollars on Monday evening following a selloff sparked by Facebook’s outage.

Facebook and its associated products, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and Oculus VR all went offline for over 6 hours causing a massive stock selloff.

According to Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Zuckerberg went down 5 percent to 120.9 billion US dollars. The dip added to a drop of about 15 percent since mid-September sending his worth dropping by nearly 20 billion dollars from a high of 140 billion.

The decline in Zuckerberg’s net worth moved Bill Gates up to the fourth spot.

The last time Facebook suffered such a blackout was in 2019 when the network shut down for 14 hours. Earlier in 2018, it also went dark for a whole day.

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The Monday outage also affected the company’s internal systems making it impossible for employees to access emails. The internal messaging system is known as Workplace, even reportedly shut some doors at company headquarters.

The Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages come barely weeks after the bombshell 60 Minutes episode on September 13 in which one Frances Haugen revealed herself as the whistleblower who released thousands of pages of private Facebook documents to the Wall Street Journal and federal government detailing how its platforms amplify hate, misinformation, and public unrest.

According to the series of stories published by the Wall Street Journal, Facebook knew about a wide range of problems with its products, including Instagram’s harm to teenage girls’ mental health and misinformation about the January 6 Capitol riots.

The journal implied that Facebook downplayed the issues in the public drawing attention from the government officials.

Facebook, however, responded that the issues facing its products, including political polarization, are complex and not caused by technology alone.

“I think it gives people comfort to assume that there must be a technological or a technical explanation for the issues of political polarization in the United States,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, told CNN.

The whistleblower, Ms. Haugen, a 37-year-old data scientist from Iowa who has worked for companies including Google and Pinterest, stated in an interview that Facebook was “substantially worse” than anything she had seen before. She called for the company to be regulated.