Facebook, Instagram and the widely-used WhatsApp messaging service are gradually returning to normal after an hours-long global outage that disabled the Facebook-owned social media platforms for some six hours.
In a post on rival platform Twitter on Monday evening, Facebook confirmed its apps were coming back online and apologised to users for a blackout that affected millions of people across the world.
“To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry,” Facebook said. “We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now.”
Mike Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook is now staring at a huge loss of more than Ksh.773.8 billion (US$.7 billion) in a few hours, knocking him down a notch on the list of the world’s richest people, after a whistleblower came forward and outages took Facebook Inc.’s flagship products offline.
A selloff sent the social-media giant’s stock plummeting 4.9 percent on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15 percent since mid-September.
The stock slide on Monday sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to Ksh.13.3 trillion (US$.121.6 billion), dropping him below Bill Gates to number 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
He’s down from almost Ksh.15.4 (US$.140 billion) in a matter of weeks, according to the index.
The outage came with Facebook under mounting pressure in the US, after a leaked internal investigation showed the social media giant was aware of how its Instagram app harmed the mental health of teenagers.
On September, 13, 2021, the Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of stories based on a cache of internal documents, revealing that Facebook knew about a wide range of problems with its products such as Instagram’s harm to teenage girls’ mental health and misinformation about the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots while downplaying the issues in public.
The reports have drawn the attention of government officials, and on Monday, the whistleblower revealed herself.
In response, Facebook has emphasized that the issues facing its products, including political polarization, are complex and not caused by technology alone.
