Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth took a tumble as Facebook Inc.’s flagship products suffered a global outage on Monday.
The Facebook CEO is said to have lost more than $6 billion in a few hours, bringing down his ranking among the world’s richest people.
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New Order Of Richest People
He is now worth $121.6 billion, falling behind Bill Gates to reach No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
This is a drop from the almost $140 billion net worth in a matter of weeks.
The 5 richest people on the planet are collectively worth $795 billion.
At pole position is Elon Musk, followed by Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault, Bill Gates and Zuckerberg.
The Outage
Facebook’s stock meanwhile plummeted 4.9% on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September.
To be blamed here is the incident in which Facebook apps like WhatsApp, Instagram and messenger suffered a major global outage on Monday evening.
The outage is estimated to have begun from 9 PM IST when users started to complain that they were not able to use any of the three services.
In response, several companies pulled advertising from Facebook Inc.’s network.
Zuckerberg apologised to users and assured resumption of online services on Tuesday (5 Oct).
However, no explanation was offered as to why it happened in the first place.
Blind Eye To Political Manipulation
The company’s trouble got doubled after a whistleblower accused the social media giant of prioritising “profit over safety” of its users.
Frances Haugen, who revealed herself to be the whistleblower, brought to light pages of Facebook’s internal research to U.S. lawmakers.
The documents served as evidence for Facebook’s dubious tactics such as inaction against misinformation and hate speech despite assuring the public of strong action.
Causing Harm To Minors?
It also appears that the company was aware of the harmful mental impact of Instagram on young girls.
It went on to conceal the truth of these impacts and chased profits and growth with plans to launch a separate version of Instagram for children under 13.
Facebook responded by saying that the issues regarding its products are complicated and technology alone cannot be blamed.
Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, told CNN that perhaps 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”.
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