Zuckerberg loses $ 5.9 billion in one day as Facebook faces rare outage, whistleblower testimony

Investor confidence in Facebook weakened a bit on Monday amid continued political pressure and a rare, long-lasting disruption to the company’s apps, causing stocks to fall 4.8% and lose billions to the fortune of CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg’s fortune declined by $ 5.9 billion to just $ 117 billion in total. (He is now the sixth richest person in the world.) Senior Lt. Sheryl Sandberg has seen her fortune drop to $ 1.9 billion.

Facebook’s shares have come under pressure on two fronts: an unusually long outage of its namesake platform, Instagram and WhatsApp, a mistake that likely cost the company tens of millions of dollars in revenue. (In the last quarter, it generated around $ 330 million in sales per day.) Facebook last suffered an outage like this in 2019, when the network was shut down for 14 hours. A decade earlier, in 2008, it was dark for a day. Monday’s blackout also affected Facebook’s internal systems, preventing employees from accessing emails, the internal messaging system known as Workplace, even would have a few doors at the company’s headquarters.

The other issue hanging over Facebook is Tuesday’s congressional hearing, where former product manager Frances Haugen will testify about her decision to become a whistleblower and release internal data to the the Wall Street newspaper. In a 60 minutes interview last night, she slammed Facebook for putting “profits before people” and failed to maintain safeguards against disinformation after the 2020 presidential election.

But Facebook’s stock has proven surprisingly enduring over the last few years of scandals, including last year’s advertising boycott and the January 6 riots. Shares remain near record highs, closing Monday at $ 326, an increase of more than 150% in five years.