Facebook found itself at the center of a scandal that hurts the corporation far more than a six-hour technological glitch in the social network
At around 5:30 p.m. Kiev time on Oct. 4, all of Facebook Inc.'s online services stopped working. The global six-hour outage was the largest since 2019: 3.5 billion users could not use WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook.
During the downtime of the services, Facebook Inc. shares plummeted 5 percent, and Mark Zuckerberg's personal fortune fell by more than $6 billion. The drop in the company's capitalization caused the billionaire to lose his fifth place in the list of world riches to Larry Ellison, STO and the founder of Oracle Corp. according to Forbes Real-Time rankings.
The main reason for the failure was a misconfiguration of the systems. Facebook apologized and said user data was safe. But the glitch is just another unpleasant event that Facebook has faced in recent weeks. The corporation is under pressure because of the revelations of former employee Frances Hogen. She handed over tens of thousands of pages of internal documents to The Wall Street Journal reporters. They set the stage for several large WSJ investigations that revealed Facebook's special treatment of VIP users. In the documents, the company also admitted that Instagram, which it owns, negatively affects teenagers.
On Sunday, Sept. 3, Hogen gave a big interview to CBS in which she declared a "conflict of interest between what's good for the public and what's good for Facebook." The interview caused a backlash, which also caused the company's stock price to plummet. Since the first WSJ investigation was published, Facebook has fallen 18.2 percent.
You must be logged in to post a comment.