Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Inc., CEO lost over $7 billion dollars following the sudden global shutdown of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Similarly, the company lost up to $100million in revenue during the seven-hour outage.
This is in addition to the billions of dollars that were wiped off the company’s share price.
Estimates say Facebook lost at least $67million in direct revenue and up to $102million hourly.
The outage of the platforms specifically pushed Facebook’s stocks down by 5.5% while Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth plummeted too.
Consequently, the development, coupled with a recent 15% drop, has totaled Zuckerberg’s loss to $19b, a Bloomberg’s report has claimed.
Also, following the loss, Mark dropped from world’s sixth richest man to the fifth, trailing behind Microsoft’s founder, Bill Gates.
Consequently, Zuckerberg’s worth came down to $120.9 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
He was formerly worth nearly $140 billion before September 13.
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Global Economy loses billions too:
Similarly, the shutdown has also led to many users of the platforms and the global economy losing billions in revenue.
Corroborating this fact, Downdetector, which tracks outages, said the real number of people affected is much higher than 10.6 million.
Also, according to NetBlocks, which tracks internet outages and their impact, the outage has cost the global economy about $160m per hour.
NetBlocks said the global outage has made a dent in the global economy exceeding $1bn US dollars.
“With Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger down for over one hour and counting, the Cost of Shutdown Tool (COST) calculates a rough estimate of ~$160m in losses to the global economy.”
Although the affected Facebook services are back on track, they started to come gradually back online for users around the world after the sixth hour of outages.
What really happened?
On Monday, the 4th of October, 2021, social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp experienced global shutdown.
Among Facebook Inc. services – Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, the Messenger platform also experienced the outage.
Meanwhile, the outages started approximately 4.42 pm local time, shutting out Facebook and its affiliate’s over 2.9b monthly active users.
Why Facebook services went down:
According to Netblocks, Network metrics indicate a disruption to connectivity on autonomous network AS32934 owned by Facebook.
The most visible impact is the loss of authoritative DNS, which prevents the company’s public services from resolving.
It is likely that non-public facing Facebook services have been similarly impacted.
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It said an alteration may have affected Facebook’s network routes, causing a knock-on impact to Domain Name System, DNS, and other servers needed to reach Facebook’s services.
The result could be server misconfigurations or datacenter problems.
Why the outage affected all Facebook services:
In 2019, Facebook merged all the platforms – Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, though the merger raised concerns.
The concerns were over the risks of centralization of social media platforms.
But Facebook said the centralization would give it a unified view of users’ internet usage habits.
However, critics said the centralization, despite the gains, also makes the services vulnerable to single points of failure.
The outage across the platforms has proven the concerns to be valid.
Another likely reason to consider too:
Meanwhile, the outage is coming after a whistleblower, Frances Haugen, who leaked documents about the company revealed her identity
She accuses Facebook of prioritizing “growth over safety.”
She is also billed to testify before a Senate subcommittee in a hearing titled “Protecting Kids Online”, about a research into Instagram’s effect on the mental health of young users.
Meanwhile, a statement by Independent said Facebook’s DNS problems were only a symptom.
It said its likely that something had happened to the underlying infrastructure such as a stray settings change.
It also said that other factors could be a physical outage at a server, or something else entirely – that has stopped it from working.
Independent noted that the system could not have broken down spontaneously.
In the moment, all the platforms are back and they have issued statements explaining what happened.
The platforms speak:
However, Facebook Inc had said it was working to restore the platforms.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products.
“We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience”, Facebook said on Twitter.
Also, Instagram had also issued an apology saying thus:
“Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them. Bear with us, we’re on it!”
The statement by Facebook Inc:
Meanwhile, hours after the outage, Facebook came out and blamed the outage on a “faulty configuration change.”
Facebook Vice President of Infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, gave the reasons in statement he titled, ‘Update about the October 4th outage.’
“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. The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.
“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.
“Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.
“People and businesses around the world rely on us everyday to stay connected. We understand the impact outages like these have on people’s lives, and our responsibility to keep people informed about disruptions to our services. We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient.”
Implication:
The outage has shown how heavily the world relies on technology to survive.
During the outage, many users got cut off from friends, family members and business associates.
Also, many businesses that run on the social media platforms recorded loses which, globally, amounted to the loss mentioned above.
Notably also, many people resorted to alternative platforms to share messages.
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