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Facebook, Whatsapp crash costs Zuckerberg Sh700 billion


Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg is reported to have lost Sh776 billion (about $7 billion) in the few hours his social media platforms, which also include WhatsApp and Instagram, crashed.

The worldwide fall of these three social media applications on Monday, October 5, 2021, also led to a tweak in the positioning of the richest people in the world, according to a report by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The stock slide sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to $121.6 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

He’s down from almost $140 billion in a matter of weeks, according to the index.

Zuckerberg had previously risen as high as No. 3 on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, but his net worth has been sliding for several weeks.

Since September 13, Zuckerberg has lost $19 billion, according to Bloomberg.

Facebook battled dueling crises on Monday as it tried to fix a large-scale outage of its dominant social network and fought against a whistleblower’s damning revelations.

On Monday evening, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger all went down. Users from different parts of the world reported not being able to access the apps for more than six hours.

Facebook said the downtime was caused by a faulty configuration change. The services are now back online.

“Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook-powered services right now,” Mike Schroepfer, the company’s chief technology officer tweeted.

“We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible,” he said, echoing similar statements by Instagram and WhatsApp.

Users trying to access Facebook in affected areas were greeted with the message: “Something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”

Facebook along with its Instagram and WhatsApp services began returning online on Tuesday morning after a massive and lengthy outage that added to the social network’s woes.

But prior to Monday’s outage, Facebook was the subject of a series of intense Wall Street Journal reports based on a trove of internal documents, which revealed that Facebook knew about a range of issues with its platforms, including how Instagram affects teenage girls and the rise of white nationalist content on Facebook.

The whistleblower, Frances Haugen, revealed her identity on “60 Minutes” Sunday night.