Facebook Services restored, founder, Zuckerberg loses $6bn over 5 hours outage

The technology giant, Facebook Inc, yesterday experienced a global service outage that kept its social media platforms offline for most of the day.

According to the company, the problems were due to problems in its network configurations, but it has added that no user data was compromised in the glitch. 

As reported earlier, the technical disruption led to Facebook’s main social networks, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger services being offline for the longest hours in the company’s recent history. 

Facebook has evolved into a suite of services that more than 2.75 billion people rely on on a daily basis for various levels of interaction, and service disruptions have caused widespread concern, with people flocking to other social networks for interaction.

The company had reported that the unfortunate occurrence damaged its internal tools and messaging systems, making it much more difficult for engineers to find and fix the problem. Resolving the underlying issues had to require a visit to the server facility and personally restarting most of them. 

In a late-night post after the services were restored, the Chief Executive Officer of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, apologized, saying, “Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about”. 

This issue of service outage is one of the series of cascading events the company currently has to endure.

A former employee turned whistleblower appeared on CBS to accuse the company of prioritizing profits over user safety. The former employee, Frances Haugen, is also set to testify before a Senate subcommittee promising to release frightening details about Facebook. 

These unfolding events, coupled with the outage of its service outage experienced yesterday, affected the company badly, with its stock prices seen to plummet and the company losing billions of dollars in market capitalization. 

Investors could not figure out how much longer the site would be down, and this resulted in selloffs, making the company’s stock fall nearly 5%, bringing its total loss since mid-September to approximately 15%.

However, this fall in value has not only affected the company and its stock price, as Mark Zuckerberg has also dropped to No. 5 in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. 

The Facebook loss resulted in gains for other social media platforms. Telegram, which functions similarly to WhatsApp, climbed up 55 positions in the download ranking while Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, endorsed Signal as a substitute for WhatsApp and added millions of new users on the day.