Aimee Walker
Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth dropped by $7billion in a matter of hours yesterday due to a social media blackout, according to Bloomberg’s Scott Carpenter.
The 37-year-old, who is now reportedly the fifth-richest person in the world, owns Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Whatsapp, which all went down for several hours.
NetBlocks, which tracks internet shortages and their impact, reported that the outage will have cost the global economy around $160m and sent the value of Facebook shares plummeting by 5%.
Find out more about the social media blackout in the clip below…
At the time of writing, Zuckerberg’s net worth now stands at $121billion.
Once everything was back up and running, the entrepreneur took to Facebook to share a statement and said he was ‘sorry’ for the ‘disruption’.
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He wrote: “Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”
TechCrunch claimed the issue was likely due to a problem with the server, saying: “Instagram shows a ‘5xx server error,’ which indicates that this is an issue with Facebook’s servers.
“Users are also unable to send messages or load new content on the mobile apps for these platforms. Even Oculus, Facebook’s virtual reality platform, is experiencing outages, according to a tweet the platform posted.
“It appears that the outage is caused by a DNS (domain name server) fail – this is the naming structure that forms the web’s infrastructure. So, if you try to navigate to facebook.com right now, the internet won’t know where to find facebook.com.”
However, Facebook has now released a statement and claimed it was their data centres that ’caused issues that interrupted this communication’.
It reads: “To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms.
“We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running.
“The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.
“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication.
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