“Everyone is just sort of standing around,” said one Facebook employee to NBC News.
Facebook did not say how many users were affected, but the applications serve billions of users worldwide.
The outage took a toll on Facebook’s stock, which fell from $335.50 a share at the opening bell to $326.23 a share at the close of the day. The 4.89% plummet personally cost Zuckerberg about $6 billion, according to estimates from Bloomberg News.
The company was also under pressure from damaging revelations from a former Facebook product manager who leaked documents of internal assessments of harm done to users of their services. Frances Haugen alleged that the leaks showed that the company cared more about profits than the health of their users.
She went on to claim that Facebook dismantled safety measures meant to reduce rancor and divisiveness on the application just ahead of the 2020 election. Haugen said they reimplemented the measures after the election was over.
“That feels like a betrayal of democracy to me,” she said.
Facebook on its own boasts almost 3 billion users.
Some critics of the company used the outage to push for congressional action to break up Facebook.
“If Facebook’s monopolistic behavior was checked back when it should’ve been (perhaps around the time it started acquiring competitors like Instagram), the continents of people who depend on WhatsApp & IG for either communication or commerce would be fine right now,” tweeted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
“Break them up,” she added.
Users reported that the social media platforms came back back online Monday evening.
Despite losing $6 billion in one day, Zuckerberg remains one of the richest people on the globe with about $121.6 billion.
Here’s more about the Facebook outage:
Facebook, Instagram And WhatsApp Hit By Massive Global Outage
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