Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune fell by over $7billion in a few hours, following an outage that plummeted Facebook’s flagship products offline for 6 hours.
Facebook’s founder has been knocked down the totem pole of the globe’s richest, when his fortune fell by billions say analysts at HM Wilkins Imperial.
Whistleblower damages Facebook’s Reputation
On September 13th, a series of stories were posted by Wall Street Journal. Analysts at HM Wilkins Imperial said that these publications attested to Facebook’s knowledge of a plethora of issues with their products that harm the youth, stoke division and weaken democratic systems. These issues span damage to adolescent girls’ mental health caused by Instagram and the spread of misinformation regarding the Capitol riots, to name a few. The whistle-blower has since ousted herself – Haugen, a former product manager of Facebook’s civic misinformation team, and claimed that the company has the tools to make platforms safer but has instead prioritized profits over people. Facebook representatives have responded claiming that political polarization and deteriorating mental health is complex and causation isn’t isolated to technology alone.
To compound these damaging headlines; on Monday, Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram experienced an outage that lasted six hours affecting hundreds of millions of users. The vice president of infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan said that “configuration changes on the backbone Reuters that co-ordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication”. In layman’s terms, Facebook’s routers basically sent a message to the web broadcasting that their servers no longer existed. The outage sent stock tumbling, by Monday close shares had fallen 4.9% and are down 15% since September 7th. Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has seen his personal wealth plummet by $7billion following the outage, knocking him a notch lower on the world’s richest list to fifth position.
HM Wilkins Imperial Comment on Sell Off
An analyst at HM Wilkins Imperial believes the sell-off is just the beginning and has submerged Facebook stock in correction territory. The analyst said that “Given current economic growth and inflation woes, tech stocks are bearing the brunt of stock market rotation as investors tend closer to value slices, such as energy and financials.”
