Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg was in the 5th position in the richest man in the world. But, the recent outage of Facebook has put him at the 6th position in the race of richest man. His wealth faced a loss of $6 billion in just a few hours. That happened when a whistleblower came forward, and Facebook took all his products offline.
That was the most unexpected event that happened to give an outage to the top trending apps. The market share price of Facebook on Monday was at 4.9. But after this outage, it went down to 15% in its value. This slide of Facebook stock has put the Mark Zuckerberg total worth below Bill Gates. His total wealth was $140 billion, which has gone to $121.6 billion. To recover this amount again by Mark Zuckerberg, it has become the problem of weeks.
According to an article published by Wall Street Journal on the 13th of September, Facebook has knowledge about the issues with their products. These problems considered affecting the mental health of teenage girls due to Instagram, providing misinformation regarding the public issue. These claims have opened the concerns of many government officials and lead to the entry of a whistleblower.
Facebook gave their opinion on it by saying that these issues are coming from political polarization but not from the usage of their products. These issues gave the audience a viewpoint that technology has arisen these problems. But political polarization in the United States cannot be justified by any technical explanation said by Facebook Vice President of Global Affairs.


The users of Facebook began to face issues at around 8:40 am PT. The services of Whatsapp and Instagram also went down. The company’s all official social media account went offline in no time. The users of social media went to other platforms like Twitter to complain about the outage. That outage lasted for 6 hours and was the longest outage in history.
However, the exact reason that produced this outage happened remains unanswered. The internal network of the company also got affected by the DNS path. That makes this outage stay for so long. This mistake of the outage has caused Facebook loss of tens of millions of dollars. But this is not the first time that Facebook went on an outage. In 2008, it lasted for 24 hours, and in 2019, it went down for 14 hours from services. That outage cost them a loss of $330 million.
Employees were also affected by this sudden outage as they could not access their emails. The whistleblower was the former product manager at Facebook and leaked the information to Wall Street Journal. She went to a 60 minutes interview but failed to provide the information regarding her claims on Facebook.
Written by: Maryem
Reported by: Mishaal Muzaffar

