Instagram, Facebook Outage Results in Mark Zuckerberg's $3 Billion Loss

New Delhi: The CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg faced a significant financial setback, losing approximately USD 3 billion in just one day. His net worth dropped by USD 2.79 billion to USD 176 billion, as per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Meta’s suite of platforms, including Facebook, Messenger, and Threads were affected by the global outage which hit social media platforms on Tuesday, March 5th, 2024, disrupting billions of users. 

Even with the considerable decline, Zuckerberg might still hold onto his rank as the world's fourth-richest person. The outage led to a 1.6 per cent drop in Meta's share, which impacted Mark Zuckerberg's overall wealth. Meta's shares closed the overnight trading session on Wall Street at USD 490.22 per share. (Also Read: Realme 12 5G Series Launched With Android 14 In India; Check Price, Specs)

As per Reuters report, Meta's status dashboard indicated problems with the application programming interface (API) for WhatsApp Business. Downdetector, a platform that gathers outage reports from various sources, including users, recorded approximately 200 reports of WhatsApp outages. (Also Read: itel Icon 2 Smartwatch With Health Monitoring Features Launched In India; Check Price, Specs)

Furthermore, numerous YouTube users encountered errors while using the platform. The outage lasted for about an hour before all services resumed normal operation. Users attempting to access these platforms were greeted with error messages and were unable to log in or refresh their feeds. On Facebook, users were presented with a "session expired" message, prompting them to log in again.

Users took to micro-blogging social media platform X (previously known and Twitter) to report the outage.