Reporter Mark Stone explains the “strange coincidence” with Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram all being down this morning. Video / Sky News Australia
Facebook's share price has been walloped by today's outage, stripping billions out of company CEO Mark Zuckerberg's personal fortune.
Business publication Forbes reported that Zuckerberg has lost US$5.9 billion ($8.5 billion) off the back of the global outage of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp.
This still leaves Zuckerberg with a cool fortune of around US$117 billion.
The company's share price slipped 4.8 per cent off the back of the outage.
The outage will also prove expensive for Facebook from a sales perspective. The company is understood to make around US$330 million a day from advertising sales - and this part of the business has been completely disabled by the blackout.
The company did not say what might be causing the outage, which began around 11.45am ET Monday (4.45am NZT today). Websites and apps often suffer outages of varying size and duration, but hours-long global disruptions are rare.
But this isn't the only factor weighing on Facebook stock at the moment.
Mark Zuckerberg is fighting a number of Facebook fires at the moment. Photo / Getty Images
The company also faced damning revelations this week during a 60 Minutes television interview, which saw a former product manager, Frances Haugen, criticise the company for putting "profits over people".
Haugen will also testify at a Congressional hearing on Tuesday, US time.
At this stage, it is still unclear what has caused the Facebook outage.
The Wall Street Journal reported the problems appeared to be linked to a change that Facebook made to networking instructions for how the world accesses its systems, according to outside experts.
At this stage there is no evidence of this outage being caused by criminal activity.
Jake Williams, chief technical officer of the cybersecurity firm BreachQuest, said that while foul play cannot be completely ruled out, chances were good that the outage is "an operational issue" caused by human error.
The New York Times has further reported that some Facebook employees who had returned to working in the office were also unable to enter buildings and conference rooms because their digital badges stopped working. Security engineers said they were hampered from assessing the outage because they could not get to server areas.
There are, however, signs that Facebook could soon become live again.
The company is reported to be in the process of reconnecting its service, so normal transmission should be restored shortly.
Facebook just started resolving DNS again... pic.twitter.com/ebGzdV22j5 — Dylan Reeve (@DylanReeve) October 4, 2021
Facebook chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer tweeted that the company is working to debug "networking issues".
"Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now," he said.
"We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible."
*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible — Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021
If history is anything to go by, Facebook stock should also recover relatively quickly once the service resumes.
Pyehouse on October 5th, 2021 at 01:44 UTC »
Translation: Facebook shares dropped 4.5%
No one lost fuck all.
RandomContent0 on October 4th, 2021 at 23:55 UTC »
He didn't 'lose' anything - unless he panic sold 100% of his Facebook stock at the lowered valuation. Which he didn't. He has as many shares of Facebook at the end of the day as he did at the start of the day.
Even if he had sold 100% of his Facebook stock (which would have pushed the daily trading price far far lower than where it moved), he would not have lost anything. He'd have cashed out a massive amount of value from his corporate holdings - just slightly less than he might have had he cashed out one day earlier.
Calierio on October 4th, 2021 at 23:21 UTC »
Unrealized loss ≠ loss