GONE IN MINUTES,OUT FOR HOURS: OUTRAGE SHAKES THE MARKET

“Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking things, you are not moving fast enough”

- Mark Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg, staying on his words, broke the market with the massive Facebook outage on October 4, 2021,which was experienced throughout the world. The three social media and messaging applications including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down for more than six hours. Facebook alone has around 3 billion monthly active users and while the largest social media platform's services were disrupted for a long time, CEO Mark Zuckerberg's lost almost $7 billion bringing down his worth to $120 .9 billion.

The stock price of Facebook went down 5%. With Facebook stock price falling, it affected the company CEO’s estimated net worth. The stock slide also pushed the Facebook CEO to fifth place on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, securing a position below Bill Gates.

The Cost Of Shutdown Tool (COST) estimates the loss caused by an internet disruption using specific indicators including from World Bank and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Facebook’s share price tumbled, and data suggests that Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook saw $40 billion in market capitalization wiped out. The demography impacted by this configuration issue is massive, and on a global scale. And that is before we count the millions of advertisers and small as well as medium businesses that rely on Facebook’s family of apps for their livelihood. WhatsApp Payments app was unavailable as well. Facebook Workplace, the company’s enterprise communications platform with more than 7 million users, was offline as well. This meant organizations which use Workplace were restricted in internal communications.

What was the impact? Facebook’s flagship social network has more than 2.8 billion users globally, while WhatsApp has two billion users and Instagram has over a billion. Facebook has more than 340 million users in India and WhatsApp has around 400 million. India also has a huge number of businesses that rely on Facebook’s services. On Meesho, for instance, sellers rely heavily on platforms such as WhatsApp—which was a driving force behind Facebook’s investment in the firm.

The Facebook and app family outage also meant services such as Sign In With Facebook that millions use on third party apps and websites, were also impacted. With no way for these services to authenticate your credentials with a Facebook server at the time, users were locked out on more than just the Facebook app or Instagram.

All of Facebook apps, including WhatsApp and Instagram, share the infrastructure. If one goes down, everything else will likely be unavailable to users. Facebook has suffered an outage in June as well, though that wasn’t of the same magnitude.