Facebook global outage cost Mark Zuckerberg $8.5 billion in few hours
- 05 Oct 2021
Gulf Today Report
WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook have started to come back online after being down for more than six hours in a major outage.
Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and the main Facebook app had all been offline for more than six hours in one of the biggest technical failures in the company’s history.
The problems also affected Facebook’s own internal services – apparently leaving it unable to properly address the outage – and the additional web traffic sent to rivals such as Twitter and Telegram meant that they slowed down dramatically.
Facebook global outage cost Mark Zuckerberg $8.5 billion, according to reports.
Panicked stockholders started selling off stock in a mass sell-off, causing shares to plummet by five per cent, creating a loss of $8.5 billion for Zuckerberg.
According to the Bloomberg Index, Zuckerberg now dropped below Bill Gates to number five on the rich list, his net worth at $120.9 billion compared to mid-September when he was at $140 billion.
Facebook spokespeople offered their apologies to everyone affected by the problems, but little by way of explanation of how the world’s biggest websites went offline for much of the day.
“To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us,” the company said in a statement posted on rival platform Twitter.
Netizens reported that social media giant Facebook, along with WhatsApp, and Instagram have all gone down in a major outage.
Facebook owns the other two apps. They run on shared infrastructure, and all faced complete shutdown on Monday evening.
It is believed that other products associated with Facebook, such as the Workplace stopped working as well.
Top official said it looks like the DNS routes that Facebook makes available to the networking world have been withdrawn.
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The Domain Name System (DNS) is an integral element of how traffic on the internet is routed.
DNS translates an address like "facebook.com” to an IP address like 123.45.67.890. If Facebook’s DNS records have disappeared, no one could find it.
Millions of users worldwide reported that they simply saw an error page when accessing Facebook.
Instagram and WhatsApp remain connected but users were unable to send or receive messages.
Gmail, TikTok and Snapchat users have complained that the apps are slowing down amid the continued outage of Facebook companies.
Facebook said it was aware that some people are having trouble accessing the app and it was working on restoring access. The company did not say what might be causing the outage, which began around 11:45 ET.
It is normal for websites and apps to suffer outages, though one on a global scale is rare. Users reported being unable to access Facebook in California, New York, Europe, and Middle East.
It is not yet known if there was any hacking attempt.
Outage tracker Downdetector showed, the outage impacting potentially tens of millions of users.
The major outage comes after a whistleblower went on US television to reveal her identity after she leaked a trove of documents to authorities alleging the social media giant knew its products were fueling hate and harming children's mental health.
Frances Haugen, a 37-year-old data scientist from Iowa, has worked for companies including Google and Pinterest -- but said in an interview with CBS news show "60 Minutes" that Facebook was "substantially worse" than anything she had seen before.
A user with the name, “@MrOddFuture” Facebook of course goes down while I’m working on the Facebook page and in the middle of sales. Ugh. Annoyed.
@basilalnajjarr: insta and whatsapp not working? this is what happens when facebook buys more apps, thank god they didnt get twitter and snap.
@AdrienneandTony: Facebook is down is anyone else's down #facebookdown.
@youellog: Is WhatsApp/other Facebook services down for anyone else? Good thing we're not trusting these ppl to run our monetary system...
On the other hand, Facebook Inc asked a judge on Monday to dismiss the US government's revised antitrust case that seeks to force the social media giant to sell Instagram and Whatsapp after he threw out an earlier version in June.
Facebook said in a court filing that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had failed to provide a "plausible factual basis for branding Facebook an unlawful monopolist." The company added it appears the FTC "had no basis for its naked allegation that Facebook has or had a monopoly."
