Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: How do fortunes fall? Although social media giant Facebook, and its products Instagram and WhatsApp, partly resumed work after a six-hour-long outage on Monday, their owner Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth plummeted by $7 billion in almost as many hours.
The three apps, all owned by Facebook and run on shared infrastructure, stopped working on Monday, as did other related products like Facebook Messenger and Workplace, across the world.
It all began after a whistleblower revealed uncomfortable facts, and outages took Facebook Inc.’s flagship products offline. A selloff sent its stock plummeting around 5 percent on Monday, adding to a drop of nearly 15 percent since mid-September, media reported.
Angry social media users and investors reacted strongly, adding to the behemoth’s stock drop.
By the end of the day, Zuckerberg’s personal wealth was down by nearly $7 billion, knocking him down a notch on the list of the world’s richest people.
The stock slide on Monday sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to $120.9 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He has lost about $19 billion of wealth since September 13, when he was worth nearly $140 billion.
The ‘contagion’ began on September 13 when the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) started publishing a series of articles based on a cache of the company’s internal documents. They revealed Facebook was aware of a wide range of problems with its products, including Instagram’s harm to teenage girls’ mental health and misinformation about the January 6 riots at the US Capitol, Washington, DC.
But Facebook downplayed the issues in public. The newspaper drew the attention of government officials, and on Monday, the whistleblower revealed herself.
In response, an embarrassed Facebook tried to stress that the issues facing its products, including political polarization, are complex and not caused by technology alone.
“I think it comforts people to assume that there must be a technological or a technical explanation for the issues of political polarization in the United States,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, was quoted as saying in media reports.