 "Facebook, Instagram down: How much did Mark Zuckerberg lose?")
In 2010, the hit Hollywood movie The Social Network was released, which was based on the founding of Facebook. In the movie, the lead actor had said: “Let me tell you the difference between Facebook and everybody else, we don’t crash ever.”
However, it seems that statement, though iconic, is just a dialogue. After all, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads, faced a global outage on Tuesday (5 March), locking out several of its users from their accounts.
But what does such an outage cost Mark Zuckerberg and the company? We get you the answers.
Facebook and Instagram go down
On Tuesday (5 March), Meta’s Facebook and Instagram experienced a major outage affecting thousands of users.
According to DownDetector, a website that tracks real-time instances of outages, Facebook reportedly went down at around 8:57 pm (local time). The tracker showed as many as 15,381 reports. Instagram too faced the outage around the same time with as many as 32,537 reports, as per the website. The issue peaked around 9.30 pm (local time) with 500,000 reports of outages for Facebook and 70,000 reports for Instagram. Notably, Meta’s WhatsApp was spared.
Many users during the outage complained that they had been suddenly logged out of their Facebook and Instagram accounts. Some others added that they weren’t provided an option to log back into their accounts, and those with two-factor authentication struggled to get codes to complete their log-ins. The issues occurred on both the app and the website.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsAcknowledging the issue, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said, “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now.”
It was after two long hours that Meta was able to restore services globally. And it was then that Stone said again: “We know some people were having trouble accessing our apps earlier. Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused, and thank you for your patience while our teams worked quickly to resolve!”
Notably, amid the outage, Elon Musk — the owner of X and Mark Zuckerberg’s rival — took a jibe, saying, “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”
X also commented, saying: “We know why you all are here right now.”
Reason for the outage
Amid Meta’s outage, the leading question by people was — ‘What caused it?’ In fact, at one point on X, #Cyberattack became one of the most trending topics, alluding that Meta’s servers had been hacked.
Later, Meta said in a statement that the problem was caused by an unspecified “technical issue”, but but didn’t share exactly what the ‘issues’ were. Andy Stone, Meta’s communication director, posted on X said: “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologise for any inconvenience.”
Cost of Meta’s outage
The outage at Facebook and Instagram is a costly mistake for Meta. Shortly after disruptions began being reported, Meta’s share price dropped by 1.5 per cent and since then fell a total of 1.6 per cent.
Dan Ives, managing director at New York’s Wedbush Securities, told DailyMail that the outage would have cost Zuckerberg approximately $100 million (Rs 832 crore) in revenue. He added that it’s unlikely that the company will reveal just how much the outage impacted them economically, but said: “This is a negligible amount of revenue that is likely below $100 million of lost revenue.”
According to a report in GBNews, the company lost 1.5 per cent of its value, which equates to equates to $18 billion (Rs 1.49 lakh crore).
Some experts also used the 2021 outage as a reference point to calculate the loss incurred by Meta. In October of that year, Meta’s Facebook and WhatsApp had suffered an outage, which Fortune had estimated cost the company $100 million in revenue. At the time, the news outlet had based the figure on Facebook’s second quarter earnings, which saw revenue of $29.08 billion (Rs 2.4 lakh crore) over a 91-day period. That works out an average of $319.6 million (Rs 2,644 crore) per day or $13.3 million (Rs 110 crore) per hour.
And now that Facebook charges a bit more for advertising, it’s seems the company may have incurred higher losses.
Meta’s brush with outages
This isn’t the first time that Meta has faced an outage. In October 2022, WhatsApp , one of the world’s largest messaging apps and part of Meta, went down for a few hours. Downdetector at the time had reported around 2.9 million users reporting an issue. “The brief outage was a result of a technical error on our part and has now been resolved,” a Meta Company spokesperson said later on.
Prior to that in October 2021, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, went down globally for close to six hours, before services were restored. It had responded by saying that the cause of the outage was a configuration change to the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between the company’s data centres, which had a cascading effect, bringing all Facebook services to a halt.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had personally then apologised for the disruption, writing, “Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”
With inputs from agencies
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