Mark Zuckerberg loses $7 billion in hours as Facebook plunges

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.

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)