The confidence of investors in Facebook decreased a bit on Monday due to the ongoing political tensions and a rare prolonged outage of its apps, which sent shares plummeting 4.8 percent and took billions of Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth.
Zuckerberg’s fortune fell by $5.9 billion to $117 billion total. (He’s currently the world’s sixth-richest individual.) the top lieutenant Sheryl Sandberg’s wealth dropped to $1.9 billion.
Facebook stock has been amid pressure from two directions that included a highly extended downtime of its website, Instagram and WhatsApp, which could have cost the company millions of dollars worth in revenues. (In the most recent quarter, it raked about $330 million every day of sales.) Facebook has had a blackout similar to this one in 2019 in which the site went down in 14-hour intervals. In 2008, the network was dark for a whole day. The outage on Monday was a problem for internal networks at Facebook, rendering it impossible for users to access their emails or an internal message system referred to as Workplace and the company’s headquarters. particularly doors in the center of the company.
Another issue is weighing in on Facebook with Tuesday’s Congressional hearing. An ex-product manager, Frances Haugen, will be questioned about her decision to be a whistleblower and disclose internal information in The Wall Street Journal. In an interview on 60 minutes interview the night before, she lashed out at Facebook for placing “profits over the interests of its users” and not ensuring security measures against false information after Trump’s 2020 election.
However, Facebook shares have been surprisingly resilient over the last few years, despite scandals like the boycott of ads the previous year as well as the Jan. 6. violence. The shares are still near records as they closed on Monday at $326. That’s over a 150% rise over the past five years.
