After a whistleblower came forward and outages brought Facebook Inc's flagship products and programs down, Mark Zuckerberg's personal fortune dropped by almost $7 billion in a matter of hours, pushing him down a rung on the list of the world's wealthiest individuals.
On Monday, investor trust in Facebook dipped a little as a result of continuing political pressure and an unusual long outage of the company's applications, sending shares down almost 5% and wiping billions off the billionaire's value.
For the current year, Facebook's stock has been on a roll, hitting a market valuation of $1 trillion in early July, though the stock price has slowed in recent months, with the market cap now hovering just short of $920 billion.
Facebook had one of its biggest outages in 10 years, with services across its entire suite of products going offline, and the internet giant struggling to put its own internal systems back online.
The stock market decline on Monday reduced Zuckerberg's net worth to $121.6 billion, putting him behind Bill Gates on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index at No. 5.
Zuckerberg is down from nearly $140 billion in just a few weeks, while his top lieutenent, Sheryl Sandberg, saw her fortune decline to almost $2 billion, according to the index.
Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has fallen by nearly $7 billion in a few hours https://t.co/Qw1BMwVZTQ — Bloomberg (@business) October 4, 2021
Internal Facebook services were also affected by Monday's outage, making it difficult for employees to access emails, the internal chat system known as Workplace, and even some electronic doors at the company's headquarters, reports said.
Facebook has responded by emphasizing that the challenges confronting its products, such as political divisiveness, are multifaceted and not only because of technological factors.
Nick Clegg, Facebook's vice president of global relations, told CNN, "I believe it gives people comfort to feel that there must be a scientific or a technical explanation for the challenges of political polarization in the U.S."
Meanwhile, the second issue weighing on Facebook is a Congressional hearing on Tuesday, where Frances Haugen, a former product manager, will speak about her determination to become a whistleblower.
She chastised Facebook for putting "profits before people" and failing to maintain measures against disinformation beyond the 2020 presidential election in a 60 Minutes interview Sunday night.
