After a whistleblower came out and outages brought Facebook Inc.'s key programmes down, Mark Zuckerberg's personal worth dropped by over $7 billion in a matter of hours, pushing him down a rung on the list of the world's richest individuals.
The stock of the social media behemoth fell over 5% on Monday, bringing its total loss to nearly 15% since mid-September.
The stock market decline on Monday reduced Zuckerberg's net worth to $120.9 billion, putting him behind Bill Gates on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index at No. 5.
Also read | Facebook outage: Mark Zuckerberg apologises, users have fun commenting
According to the index, he has lost over $19 billion in value since September13, when he was worth nearly $140 billion.
The Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of stories on September 13 based on a cache of internal documents.
Revealing that Facebook was aware of a wide range of problems with its products — including Instagram's negative impact on teenage girls' mental health and misinformation about the January 6 Capitol riots — while downplaying the issues in public.
The reports drew the attention of government authorities, and the whistleblower came forward on Monday.
Also Read |Router was bad, says Facebook after FB, Instagram, WhatsApp go down
From a revenue standpoint, the downtime will be costly for Facebook.
Advertising revenues are thought to bring in approximately US$330 million every day for the firm, and the blackout has rendered this aspect of the business entirely inoperable.
$50 billion wiped off Facebook's market capitalisation after global outage
As a result of a global outage of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, Facebook's market capitalization dropped by approximately $50 billion.
According to Fortune, Facebook lost $99.75 million in income during the downtime on Monday, which lasted for more than six hours.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, saw his net worth plummet by more than $6 billion.
(With inputs from agencies)