Zuckerberg loses $7bn to WhatsApp, Facebook, others shutdown

By Chinenye Anuforo  and Adanna Nnamani (Abuja)

Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth fell by almost $7 billion in 6 hours, knocking him down a notch on the list of the world’s richest people, after a whistleblower came forward and took Facebook Inc.’s flagship products offline. 

According to Bloomerg, Facebook’s stock plummeted by 4.9 per cent, adding to a drop of about 15 per cent since mid-September.

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. It was gathered that the problem began when a whistleblower lodged a complaint against  Facebook Inc.’s flagship products offline accusing the platforms of promoting some social vices and putting profit over safety of its users.

In a tweet, Chief Technology Officer at Facebook, Mike Schroepfe, said, “Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”

Meanwhile, Nigeria lost about $22.5billion (N8.2billion) in six hours following global outage of Facebook,  Instagram and WhatsApp on Monday, according to NetBlocks, a cybersecurity watchdog.

The cost of this outage, the cybersecurity watchdog said, was to the tune of $160 million to the global economy. 

NetBlocks explained the Cost Of Shutdown Tool (COST) estimates the loss caused by an internet disruption using specific indicators, including from World Bank and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and the main Facebook app had all been offline for more than six hours in one of the biggest technical failures in the company’s history.

Panicked stockholders started selling off stock in a mass sell-off, causing  Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook to lose as much as $7 billion and Facebook saw $40 billion in market capitalisation wiped out.