Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram down: Zuckerberg loses billions

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp had to face a huge blackout yesterday evening, which blocked all the services offered by these social networks for over six hours. Although all social networks are now back online, the CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg lost more than 6 billion dollars within a few hours precisely because of today’s Down.

Facebook Down: Zuckerberg loses billions

As reported by Bloomberg, Facebook shares fell nearly 5% and 15% from mid-September yesterday evening. As expected, these numbers also affected Zuckerberg’s value, which ended the day at $ 121.6 billion. Zuckerberg slipped to 5th place on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a ranking of the 500 richest people in the world. In 4th place now sits Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates with a net worth of $ 124 billion.

Users started experiencing problems with the services of Facebook (that include WhatsApp e Instagram) around 5pm. About an hour later, all of the company’s social networks around the world went completely offline. Several users then flocked to Twitter and other social networks to complain about the outage, which lasted more than six hours.

The exact reasons that caused the interruption remain unclear, from what has emerged so far it seems that Facebook has been affected by a DNS problem which has “deleted” the paths to the domains of the social network and its associates. The company’s internal network was also affected, which made the outage even longer and more complicated.

In a nutshell it is as if Facebook and the other social networks affected had been forcibly excluded from the internet, since all the ways to connect had been changed. For this the company had to intervene directly on the data center in Santa Clara in California to solve the problem.