Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, is estimated to have lost $7 billion in less than 10 hours. This unbelievable sum also brings him down a notch in the list of richest people in the world according to Bloomberg, placing him after Bill Gates at number 5.
As of 3a.m. on Tuesday morning, the Facebook stock took a nose-dive down by 4.89% in the stock exchange, after Monday night’s blackout, when the company’s servers all crashed at once, leaving millions of users without Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp or Messenger platforms.
It took six hours for the social media giant corporation to recuperate. Whatsapp in Israel returned to full operation only 8 hours after the original outage. The internet was a raging sea without its usual posting outlets, comparing the event to a Black Mirror episode and using apocalyptical humor to vent frustration of users honed to complete dependence on the posts, videos, stories and feeds.
In addition to Facebook’s collapse, Amazon also lost about 2.85%. Last night, it too reported technical difficulties during the most significant worldwide social media paralysis in years. Surprisingly, Twitter took the hardest hit of the night.
Although the app became the holy grail for addicted social media users and the most active platform while its competitors were down, at the end of the day, its value plummeted 5.79% in 24 hours. The assumption is that Twitter was affected just like Snapchat (which dropped 5.34%) and Facebook when whistleblower Frances Haugen accused the organization of prioritizing profit over user safety or concerns. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell by 2.14% in a day, bringing it to its lowest point in the past month of steady decline.
The long-term outcome is yet to be seen; however, in light of the difficult statements made by Haugen on money-making vs responsibility, on service and misinformation, it seems that this week will be a harsh reality check for the social media hegemons.
