The total considerable loss Zuckerberg suffered since September 13 amounts to USD 19 billion when his net worth stood at USD 140 billion as reported by Bloomberg.

Mark Zuckerberg founder and CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of Facebook Inc. lost over USD 7 billion in a few hours, bringing him down in the list of world’s richest individuals, after the WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram users from all over the globe observed the platforms going down yesterday evening. 

The worldwide crash of the platforms led to Facebook’s share price dropping by 5 percent which is cumulatively a 15 percent plummet since mid of the last month. 

The share price downfall pulled Zuckerberg’s net worth by bulk USD 7 billion to USD 120.9 billion, knocking him down to rank 5th, below Bill Gates according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index. 

The total considerable loss Zuckerberg suffered since September 13 amounts to USD 19 billion when his net worth stood stunningly at USD 140 billion as reported by Bloomberg. 

The major fall in the stock took place after the whistleblower Frances Haugen going vocal about how Facebook puts profits over ethics. 

The facebook-acquired apps including WhatsApp and Instagram were down for its users globally on Monday evening which expectedly moved them to Twitter to share about the worldwide outage. The news was trending on the platform with hashtags ‘#InternetShutDown’, ‘#serverdown’, ‘#whatsappdown’, ‘#SocialMediaDown’, ‘#facebookdown’, etc.  The social networking and microblogging platform was flooded with tweets regarding the outage. One of the tweets Facebook posts quotes, “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Facebook app. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.” 

Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer, Mike Schroepfer also participated in Twitter expressing his apologies to everyone affected by the outage. He tweeted, “*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible, and we apologize for any convenience.”

Facebook’s team tweeted, “To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.”

What led to the global outage?

 It is anticipated by many users and tech experts on Twitter that the outage was a result of a DNS (Domain Name System) issue which helps organize the internet with allocation of domains including “.net” or “.com”. The company said its engineering team believes the reason is the configuration changes that manage coordination of network traffic between data centers. 

However, after nearly six hours of the global outage, the Facebook- operated apps began to function partially. 

Today, Facebook tweeted about the news on regaining the access of the platforms including WhatsApp and Instagram. It shared, “We’re coming back online! Thank you all for your patience and we sincerely apologize to everyone affected by the outage.” The global outage came after the blast of whistleblower denouncing and accusing Facebook of putting profit before its users’ good. The data scientist, disguised as a whistleblower , said that the company always chooses its own interests over public good. Unveiled as Frances Haugen in an hour interview that took place on October 3, 2021, the whistleblower filed with federal law enforcement that the corporation’s research stands witness to how it fuels the spread of misleading information.