Mark Zuckerberg faces another blowback after whistleblower deposition as Facebook loses $7 billion in a day after a rare outage

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Washington D.C
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill April 11, 2018 in Washington, DC. GETTY IMAGES

On Monday, investors lost faith in Facebook due to continuing political pressure and an unusually extended outage of the company's programs, sending shares down 4.8 percent and wiping billions off CEO Mark Zuckerberg's fortune.

Zuckerberg's net worth has dropped by $5.9 billion to $117 billion. (He is presently the world's sixth wealthiest man.) Sheryl Sandberg, a top lieutenant, saw her net worth plummet to $1.9 billion.

Two factors weighed on Facebook stock: an abnormally protracted outage of its namesake platform, as well as Instagram and WhatsApp, a blunder that cost the business tens of millions of dollars in revenue. (In the most recent quarter, sales averaged over $330 million each day.) The last time Facebook experienced a blackout like this was in 2019 when the network was down for 14 hours. It had gone dark for a day a decade before, in 2008. According to reports, internal Facebook services were also affected by Monday's outage, making it impossible for employees to access emails, the internal chat system known as Workplace, and even some doors at the company's headquarters.

Another issue weighing on Facebook is a Congressional hearing on Tuesday, where Frances Haugen, a former product manager, will speak about her decision to become a whistleblower and expose inside data to the Wall Street Journal. She chastised Facebook for putting "profits over people" and failing to maintain safeguards against misinformation after the 2020 presidential election in a 60 Minutes interview yesterday night.

However, despite a slew of crises in recent years, including last year's ad boycott and the Jan. 6 riots, the Facebook stock has held up quite well. Shares are still around record highs, closing at $326 on Monday, a more than 150 percent gain in five years.

Publish : 2021-10-05 14:56:00

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