Mark Zuckerberg‘s worth has dropped by more than $7 billion in only a few hours as a result of a damning whistleblower account and outages that plagued Facebook Inc’s main platforms such as WhatsApp and Instagram, bringing him down a rung on the list of the world’s richest people.
The shares of the social media giant fell 4.9 percent on Monday, extending a slide of almost 15 percent since mid-September, Bloomberg reported.
His losses
The stock market decline on Monday reduced Zuckerberg’s net worth to $121.6 billion, putting him behind Bill Gates on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index at No. 5. According to the index, he has lost about $140 billion in a few weeks.
Series of stories published by The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of stories on September 13 based on a cache of internal documents, revealing that Facebook was aware of a wide range of issues with its products – such as Instagram’s negative impact on teenage girls’ mental health and misinformation about the Capitol riots on January 6 – while downplaying the issues in public.
The reports drew the attention of government officials, and the whistleblower came forward on Monday.
Facebook’s response
Facebook has responded by emphasizing that the difficulties confronting its products, such as political divisiveness, are complex and not just due to technological factors.
“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.
Mark Zuckerberg apologizes
Meanwhile, following a six-hour social media outage that affected Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp on Tuesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized.
In a post on Facebook, Zuckerberg said the social media platforms were coming back to normal. “Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about,” he wrote.
At around noon Eastern time (1600 GMT), Facebook and its WhatsApp and Instagram apps went dark, in what website monitoring firm Downdetector described as the largest such outage it has ever witnessed. Some users began to regain partial access to the three apps around 5:45 p.m. ET (0045 p.m. GMT).
The outage was the business’s second setback in as many days, following a whistleblower’s accusation on Sunday that the corporation has consistently prioritized profit before cracking down on hate speech and misinformation.
The error message on Facebook’s page revealed a problem with the Domain Name System (DNS), which directs users to their destinations using web addresses. In July, a similar failure at cloud services provider Akamai Technologies Inc brought down various websites.
Several Facebook employees who did not want to be identified said they believe the outage was caused by an internal routing error to an internet domain, which was exacerbated by the failures of internal communication tools and other resources that rely on that domain to function.
About Mark Zuckerberg
From his Harvard University dorm room, Mark Zuckerberg co-founded the social-networking website Facebook. Zuckerberg dropped out of college after his sophomore year to focus on the site, which now has a user base of over two billion people, making him a multimillionaire. The Social Network, a 2010 film, depicted the development of Facebook.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin. It allowed users to create their profiles, upload photos, and communicate with other users. Until June 2004, the site was run out of a dorm room at Harvard University.
Zuckerberg turned down offers from Yahoo! and MTV Networks because he didn’t want to sell out. Instead, he focused on developing the site, allowing independent developers to work on it, and adding new features.
