Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp faced a massive outage earlier today that took down all services offered by the company for over 6 hours. Although all of the company’s social networks are back online, that didn’t stop Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg from losing more than $6 billion in a matter of hours due to today’s outage.
As reported by Bloomberg, Facebook stocks were down nearly 5% on Monday, and 15% down compared to mid-September. As expected, these numbers also affected Zuckerberg’s worth, which ended the day at $121.6 billion. Zuckerberg has slipped to 5th place in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a ranking of the 500 richest people in the world. In 4th place is now Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates with $124 billion net worth.
Users began experiencing issues with Facebook’s services (which includes WhatsApp and Instagram) around 8:40 AM PT. It wasn’t long before all of the company’s social networks went completely offline around the world. Several users went to Twitter and other social networks to complain about the outage, which lasted more than 6 hours.
While the exact reasons that caused the outage remain unclear, it seems that Facebook was affected by a DNS problem that “wiped” the paths to Facebook domains. Even the company’s internal network was affected, which made the outage even longer and more complicated.
By 6PM ET, both Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were back online. 9to5Mac had extensive coverage of today’s Facebook outage, which you can read all about here.