Zuckerberg Loses $6 Billion After Facebook Outage, Whistleblower Testimony

Social media giant Facebook Chief Executive and Founder Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has fallen by nearly $7 billion (R105 billion) in a few hours, knocking him down a notch on the list of the world’s richest people, after a whistleblower came forward and outages took Facebook Inc.’s flagship products offline such as Instagram and WhatsApp Messenger.

As reported by Bloomberg, Facebook stocks were down nearly 5% on Monday, and 15% down compared to mid-September. As expected, the stock slide on Monday sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to $120.9 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He’s lost about $19 billion of wealth since Sept. 13, when he was worth nearly $140 billion, according to the index.

But prior to Monday’s outage, Sept. 13, the WSJ began publishing a series of stories based on a cache of internal documents, revealing that Facebook knew about a wide range of problems with its products, such as Instagram’s harm to teenage girls’ mental health and misinformation about the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, while downplaying the issues in public. The reports have drawn the attention of government officials, and on Monday, the whistleblower, Frances Haugen revealed her identity on “60 Minutes” Sunday night. 

“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook, and Facebook over and over again chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money,” she said on the show.

In response, Facebook has emphasized that the issues facing its products, including political polarization, are complex and not caused by technology alone. “I think it gives people comfort to assume that there must be a technological or a technical explanation for the issues of political polarization in the United States,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s Vice President of Global Affairs, told CNN.