Here's The Reason Behind Monday's Facebook And Instagram Down & How Much $ Zuckerberg Lost

The two sites, along with WhatsApp, were down for six hours.

Contributing Writer

Social media lovers faced a difficult day on Monday with Facebook and Instagram down, and the company that runs them all finally explained what happened to these two websites, plus WhatsApp, later that day.

Basically, tech stuff was being changed around and an error occurred.

"We believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change," Facebook wrote on its engineering site last night. "Configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt."

Luckily, the company said there's no reason to believe that user data was compromised during the six-hour downtime.

Not so luckily for Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, the tech issue ended up being a several billion-dollar problem.

According to Forbes, Zuckerberg lost approximately $6 billion from his net worth due to the outage, meaning that he tumbled down to a net worth of $117 billion. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg also took a massive hit, losing nearly $2 billion in a matter of hours, Forbes reported.

Once the website was back up and running, Zuckerberg wrote on his personal Facebook page. "Sorry for the disruption today -- know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about."

  • Alanna Moore
  • Contributing Writer

    Alanna Moore is a Contributing Writer for MTL Blog. She completed a Bachelor of Arts in religious studies & cultural studies from McGill University in 2019. With over three years experience in editing and writing, she has developed a real passion for words and the people who speak them. You can contact her at alanna@mtlblog.com.

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