Mark Zuckerberg has lost over $6 billion in a few hours, pushing him down a notch on the list of the world¡¯s richest people.?
Also Read:?Facebook Crisis: Whistleblower Shares How FB Chose Profit Over User's Mental Health
Reported first by Bloomberg, this came after the statements made by whistleblower Frances Haugen that spoke about how Facebook would prioritise money over safety of its users.
What made matters worse was the hours of blackout that was caused by a massive outage at Facebook, shutting down access to all of Facebook¡¯s products including the social media platform, Instagram, WhatsApp and even Oculus.
Both issues compounded to result in a selloff causing Facebook¡¯s stock to drop by a considerable 4.9 percent, adding to a 15 percent drop since mid-September.?
This drop in stock value got his net worth to 121.6 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates, who sits today at number 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. In fact, as per the index, he has come down almost $140 billion in just a few weeks.?
Also Read:?Facebook, Instagram And WhatsApp Were Down: Here's What We Know
This could have been one of the worst outages experienced by Facebook in the company¡¯s history. According to Facebook¡¯s VP of Infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, the outage was the result of a faulty configuration change.?
He stated, ¡°Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.¡±
The outage not only brought down Facebook¡¯s services for its users but also internal applications and services for the company.?
Also Read:?What Caused WhatsApp, Instagram And Facebook To Go Offline: Blame It On BGP
According to CTO Mike Schroepfer, the issue affected the company¡¯s networking backbone that connected all the data centres together. In fact, it even broke the ability for employees to access company buildings with their badges.
What did you do when Facebook services went down? Tell us in the comments below. For more science and technology news, keep visiting Indiatimes.com.