WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook are back online after being down for more than six hours in a major outage, causing Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealt
WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook are back online after being down for more than six hours in a major outage, causing Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth to drop by nearly $7 billion.
The three apps which are all owned by Facebook, and run on shared infrastructure stopped working shortly before 5 pm with users unable to send or receive messages or refresh their news feeds.
Facebook blamed a ‘faulty configuration change’ for the outage that prevented the company’s billions of users from accessing its apps and services.
According to Bloomberg, a selloff sent the social-media giant’s stock plummeting around 5% on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September.
The stock slide on Monday sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to $120.9 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He’s lost about $19 billion of wealth since September 13, when he was worth nearly $140 billion, according to the index.
On September 13, the Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of stories based on a cache of internal documents, revealing that Facebook knew about a wide range of problems with its products, such as Instagram’s harm to teenage girls’ mental health and misinformation about the January 6 Capitol riots while downplaying the issues in public.
The reports have drawn the attention of government officials, and on Monday, a whistleblower revealed herself for the first time and accused the social media giant of putting “profit over safety” of its users.
In response, Facebook has emphasized that the issues facing its products, including political polarization, are complex and not caused by technology alone.
In a Facebook post after the service had been restored, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote: “Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger are coming back online now.
“Sorry for the disruption today, I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”
Facebook in an official statement said: “To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms.
“We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running.
