Mark Zuckerberg’s personal fortune fell by more than 6 billion dollars (5.2 billion euros) on Monday in a few hours, and went from fourth to fifth on the list of the richest in the world, according to data from Bloomberg, after that Facebook and its Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp services suffered a fall of almost six hours that left its 3.5 billion users unable to send messages and publish on those social networks.
The massive sale of Facebook shares, which translated into a 4.9% loss on the stock market, to $ 326.23, spread among large technology companies. Google, Apple and Amazon fell between 2% and almost 3% during the Nasdaq session. The index that groups the largest US technology companies closed the day with a 2% drop.
The last three weeks have been tough for Facebook. Not only because of the blackout, one of the biggest according to experts, but also because of the internal documents of the company that it has published these days The Wall Street Journal, in which it is revealed how the search for profit is prioritized over the public interest. The engineer who leaked those files to the newspaper, Frances Haugen, made her face in an interview on CBS on Sunday night. Haugen spoke of “constant conflicts of interest between what is good for the public and what is good for Facebook” in which the technology “always chose to optimize its own benefit.” Since mid-September, the company has lost 13% of its value on the stock market.
The $ 6 billion that evaporated from Zuckerberg’s fortune on Monday left a net worth of $ 121.6 billion, behind Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault and Bill Gates. And the losses may escalate this Tuesday, when Haugen is scheduled to testify before the US Senate.
Millions of new people have joined Signal today and our messaging and calling have been up and running but some people aren’t seeing all of their contacts appear on Signal. We’re working hard to fix this up.
– Signal (@signalapp) October 4, 2021
The blackout has been a blow to Facebook and exposed how much the world depends on a company as questioned as this to communicate, but it has also had positive effects on competition. Twitter had one of the highest levels of activity in its history. Even those responsible for Facebook had to use this social network to announce that they were beginning to recover activity. “To the great community of people and companies around the world who depend on us: we are sorry,” they tweeted. Millions of users signed up for the Signal messaging system, which Edward Snowden supports, according to reported the company on Twitter. And the instant messaging app Telegram was among the most downloaded apps in the United States, according to Bloomberg.