Zuckerberg loses $7billion in less than 6 hours after Facebook global outage

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has plummeted by almost $7 billion in the past few hours, Bloomberg reports, hit by the combination of a whistleblower coming forward and outages worldwide for Facebook and its flagship products.

“A selloff sent the social-media giant’s stock plummeting around 5% on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September,” Bloomberg says.

Zuckerberg’s worth has now fallen to $120.9 billion, placing him below Bill Gates, at No. 5, on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

“He’s lost about $19 billion of wealth since Sept. 13, when he was worth nearly $140 billion.”

On Sept. 13, the Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of stories based on a cache of internal documents, revealing that Facebook knew about 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.

In response, Facebook has emphasized that the issues facing its products, including political polarization, are complex and not caused by technology alone.

“I think it gives people comfort to assume that there must be a technological or a technical explanation for the issues of political polarization in the United States,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, told CNN.