User:Sofia Labarca/sandbox

Facebook Outage October 4, 2021
On October 4th, 2021, social media applications Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger were crashed for hours. The social media platforms, all of which are owned by FacebookCategory:Facebook, were down for approximately six hours. It was reported that the platforms stopped functioning for before 5 pm (12 pm EST). Overall, approximately 10.6 million users were affected globally. Some of the areas that were affected the harshest in North America were Toronto, Tampa, San Francisco, Boston, among others. The root cause of the outage was never disclosed by Facebook, who has a history of not making the causes of their outages available to the general public. On October 14th, 2021, Instagram faced a second outage affecting users globally at around 3 pm EST. Instagram responded to the outage by revealing that they have been working on a system to notify users through their ‘Activity Feed’ of when the platform is experiencing technical difficulties. These outages are not the only problem Facebook is experiencing at the moment. Recently, a whistleblower who previously worked at Facebook came forward with allegations that the company was more interested in driving up profits instead of eliminating misinformation and hate speech spread on the platform.

Financial Implications
The outage of these social media platforms caused had financial consequences on Facebook and its owner, Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook’s stocks plummeted by 5.3%, leaving them at their lowest since 2020; they were valued at $326.23 a share. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth was also affected. The social media platforms’ crash made the CEO loose $6 billion dollars in a few hours, bringing his net worth down to 121.6 billion. This pushed the billionaire’s ranking down to number 5 on the Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index and allowed Bill Gates to surpass him.