A GLOBAL outage of Facebook Inc’s flagship products resulted in founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth plummeting by close to $7 billion in a few hours.
Social networks owned by the technology company, namely Facebook Messenger, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, were offline for several hours on Monday all over the world.
“Billions of users have been impacted by the services being entirely offline today,” tracker Downdetector wrote on its website.
A selloff sent the social-media giant’s stock plummeting around 5% on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September, Bloomberg’s Scott Carpenter reports.
In this report, Carpenter says the stock slide sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to $120,9 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to number 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
According to reports, this comes amid damning revelations by a whistleblower about Facebook’s practices and impact.
In response, Facebook has emphasised 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 polarisation in the United States,” Facebook’s vice president of global affairs Nick Clegg told CNN.
– compiled from Bloomberg, DW
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