From Adanna Nnamani, Abuja
Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth fell by almost $7 billion in 6 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.
According to Bloomerg, Facebook’s stock plummeted by 4.9% today, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September. Shareholders aren’t finding it funny, I think.
The stock slide sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to $121.6 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He’s down from almost $140 billion in a matter of weeks, according to the index.
It was gathered that the problem began when a whistleblower lodged a complaint against Facebook Inc.’s flagship products offline accusing the platforms of promoting some social vices and putting profit over safety of its users.
In a tweet, Chief Technology Officer at Facebook, Mike Schroepfe, said, “Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”
The Wall Street Journal on September 13, began publishing a series of stories based on a cache of internal documents which indicated that Facebook was aware of a wide range of problems with its products, such as Instagram’s harm to teenage girls’ mental health and misinformation about the Jan. 6 Capitol riots — while downplaying the issues in public.
The reports have drawn the attention of government officials, and on Monday, the whistleblower revealed herself for the first time and accused the social media giant of putting “profit over safety” of its users.
Facebook in defence, claimed that the issues it was being blamed for were not totally under its control but rather a complex one.