Mark Zukerberg, the Chief Executive Officer of Facebook lost nearly $7bn to the shutdown of the social media platforms, which was experienced around the world at about 4:42pm on Monday. The shutdown also affected WhatsApp and Instagram.
Facebook and its affiliates have 2.9billion active monthly users. Users across the world were unable to send messages or load new content on the mobile apps of these platforms. Even Oculus, Facebook’s virtual reality platform and workplace was down.
According to a NetBlocks report, the social media shutdown cost the global economy about $160m per hour. In all, the global economy lost billions of dollars to the outage.
Facebook has not commented on the cause of the outage, though experts say evidence point to a problem with the company’s network that cut off Facebook from the wider internet.
The outage which lasted for more than six hours marked the longest stretch of downtime for Facebook since 2008 when a bug knocked the site offline for about a day affecting nearly 80 million users. In 2019, a similar outage occurred but lasted for just an hour.
