Hours after WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram crashed in Nigeria and across the globe due to technical difficulties, Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has reportedly fallen by nearly $6 billion in a few hours.
The development further knocked him down the pecking order on the list of the world’s richest people, after outages took out Facebook flagship products – Whatsapp and Instagram offline.
Yahoo Finance reported that a selloff sent the social-media giant’s stock plummeting around five per cent on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September.
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 has lost about $19 billion of wealth since September 13, when he was worth nearly $140 billion, according to the index.
On September 13, the Wall Street Journal 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 revealed herself.
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.