Mark Zuckerberg, kicked down from the list of the world’s richest people?
The recent social media outage was indeed the hot topic that shook the world drastically. However more or less concerned regarding the communication difficulties many were ridiculing and creating memes for Mark Zuckerberg for entertainment purposes and apps such as TikTok and Twitter were able to receive the spotlight to express the dissatisfaction with the outage, which lasted over six hours during the absence of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. According to Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg's fortune dropped by more than $6 billion as a result of the global outage of social media apps. (Source - Bloomberg )
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's wealth dropped by over $6 billion in just a few hours, knocking him down a notch on the list of the world's wealthiest people. A whistleblower came forward hours before the disruption and exposed her identity, which most likely contributed to the outage. Zuckerberg is now in sixth place, with $120.9 billion, behind Bill Gates. Facebook's stock has lost roughly 5% of its value since mid-September, bringing the total loss to 15% (Source - Bloomberg)
In consideration of The Index, Zuckerberg's net worth has dropped by about $140 billion in just a few weeks. The Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of stories based on a cache of internal documents, revealing that Facebook was aware of a wide range of issues with its products such as Instagram's negative impact on teenage girls' mental health and misinformation about the January 6 Capitol riots while downplaying the issues in public.
The reports drew the attention of government officials, and the whistleblower came forward on Monday. After applying for federal whistleblower protection, Frances Haugen, 37, revealed her true name. Internal records were provided to Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and The Wall Street Journal by Haugen. She chose to divulge her identity, stating that Facebook realized that changing the algorithm to make it safer would result in people spending less time on the site and clicking on fewer advertisements, resulting in less revenue. Haugen was the one who submitted papers and information about Instagram's negative effects on adolescent mental health, which led to the platform's suspension of Instagram Kids.
As a response from Facebook, they stressed that the issues it faces, such as political polarization, are complex and not solely due to technology.“I think it gives people comfort to assume that there must be a technological or technical explanation for the issues of political polarization in the United States,” said Nick Clegg, Facebook's vice president of global affairs, to CNN. This was one of the most prolonged outages Facebook and its services, such as WhatsApp, have ever experienced. The source of the global outage, according to Facebook, was a router problem. The outage was caused by an erroneous configuration update, according to Facebook.
The impact unavoidably trickled down to small businesses, who experienced the various severity levels of a social impact outage in a couple of hours. Some observed a drop in engagement and traffic, while others saw a drop in revenues as a result of the disruption to their social media outlets.?
Various tools integrated within Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp have become incorporated in company strategies and budgets for even the small firms, from sponsored posts to Instagram's storefront. On Monday, small business owners were at the mercy of Facebook after a more than six-hour outage left them unable to make income or communicate with consumers. After losing sales, business owners told BuzzFeed News that it made them reconsider how dependent they should be on Facebook goods. The outage has already been resolved, but it has sparked a discussion among businesses and their owners that rely on Facebook for their operations.?
However, Facebook has been responsible for the mishap caused by them in which they apologized for the inconvenience to the vast network of people and businesses who rely on them all across the world through Twitter. Therefore, it can be mentioned that as much as we complain about the negative impacts of social media, the recent outage was a great eye-opener for everyone to understand the vitality of platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp to the survival of businesses, and protect income sources.?