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Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at the 56th Munich Security Conference in Munich, southern Germany, February 15, 2020.
Christof Stache | AFP | Getty Images
Facebook shares fell nearly 5% on Monday after the company suffered its worst service outage in about 13 years, and a day after “60 Minutes” aired an interview with a whistleblower , who accused the company of betraying democracy.
The market was broadly down on Monday, with the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite falling more than 2%. The decline was particularly marked among social media stocks, as Twitter, Snap and Pinterest each fell more than 5%.
Shortly before noon ET, Facebook’s main app crashed, as did its Instagram and WhatsApp services. They remained offline when the market closed.
“We are aware that some people have difficulty accessing our applications and products,” the company said. in a tweet. “We are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
The outage marks the worst for Facebook since 2008, when a bug took the company’s services offline for about a day, affecting around 80 million users. The company now has 3 billion users.
It’s been a tough week for Facebook, and got worse on Sunday night.
In an interview with “60 Minutes,” Frances Haugen was revealed to be the whistleblower who provided key internal company documents to the Wall Street Journal. The Journal used the information in a series of recent reports titled “The Facebook Files”.
Haugen is a former product manager in Facebook’s civic disinformation division who left the company in May and made copies of numerous internal files before leaving the company. Haugen accused Facebook of prioritizing its “own profits over public safety – putting people’s lives at risk”.
Facebook shares slipped 4.9% to close at $ 326.23. The stock is still up 19% this year.
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