Last Updated on 22/11/2021 by Sanskriti
According to Forbes, Mark Zuckerberg is facing significant financial implications, including the loss of billions of dollars and his position as the world’s fifth-richest man, as people continue to be locked out of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. A whistleblower came out hours before the disruption and exposed her name, which most likely contributed to the outage. Zuckerberg’s personal worth decreased by nearly $6 billion in only a few hours.
With all four online platforms being off the air for many hours, Zuckerberg has received a barrage of criticism from competitor social media sites, and regular Facebook users have resorted to other applications that aren’t affected, such as Twitter and Telegram, to voice their displeasure. Many people have even rejoiced in the lack of Facebook.
According to The Index, Zuckerberg’s net worth has dropped by over $140 billion in only a few weeks. 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 issues with its products — such as Instagram’s negative impact on teenage girls’ mental health and misinformation about the January 6 Capitol riots — while underplaying the issues in public.
According to Forbes’ real-time tracking, Zuckerberg has lost billions as a result of the downtime. Its list of “today’s winners and losers” goes back to the previous day’s closing of business, implying that the CEO’s enormous losses had happened since users began encountering technological difficulties.
Also, the attention has been directed to the whistleblower Frances Haugen, who came forward with her true identity in an interview with ‘60 minutes’, revealing the files and documents. Internal papers were given to Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and The Wall Street Journal by Haugen. She chose to expose her name, stating that Facebook realized that changing the algorithm to make it safer would result in users spending less time on the site and clicking on fewer advertisements, resulting in less revenue. Haugen was the one who provided papers and information about Instagram’s negative effects on adolescent mental health, which led to the platform’s suspension of Instagram Kids.
“I think it gives people comfort to assume that there must be a technological or a technical explanation for the issues of political polarisation in the United States,” Nick Clegg said, Vice president of global affairs at Facebook.
This was one of the most prolonged outages Facebook and its services, such as WhatsApp, have ever experienced. The source of the global outage, according to Facebook, was a router issue. The outage was caused by a defective configuration update, according to Facebook.
