Outage Worth of $6 Billion: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp News

  • 05-10-2021 |
  • Abigail Davis

Mark Zuckerberg lost $6 billion in several hours of a social media outage. His position at the market went down, below the former Microsoft holder Bill Gates. Now he is in 5th place on Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The fall happened immediately after Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp went offline. Although these social networks were restored, Zuckerberg's wealth decreased.

Mark Zuckerberg’s personal income proved to be in tight connection with Facebook’s well-being. On Monday, stocks of the company lost 4.9 percent, having fallen down by 15 percent since the middle of September. The CEO’s stocks also dropped down, leaving him with $121.6 billion, below Gates in the Billionaires Index. A few weeks ago, Zuckerberg stocks were worth $140 billion.

The Problem Behind

The outage lasted for 6 hours. Facebook officials, including Zuckerberg, apologized for that and told the audience that the problem was technical, not connected with any leakages. However, this short disconnection affected 3.5 billion users around the world. According to the company, the problem was caused by a simple command that engineers couldn’t handle at first. It appeared during the maintenance standard work. Once it arose, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram were disconnected from their data centers. Since there was a bug in Facebook’s audit service, it failed to stop the command, according to Vice-President of Facebook infrastructure Santosh Janardhan.

Facebook employees could not use any tools from inside to quickly fix the problem. The failed command made such a correction impossible. After the problem was fixed, users could enter their accounts again. Facebook officials confirmed that they were working hard to find other gaps in the system and fix them. The company insisted that users’ data was not compromised.

Have you noticed the social network’s outage as well? Did it affect you in any way? You can share your story with us in the comments below.

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