As Facebook scrambled to solve the issue, investors ditched the stock, sending it almost five percent lower to $326.23 per share. It was the stock’s biggest one-day plummet since November 9, 2020.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth took a more than $6 billion hit on Monday, sending him below Microsoft founder Bill Gates to No. 5 on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. Zuckerberg is now worth about $121.6 billion, down from almost $140 billion just a couple weeks ago, according to Bloomberg.
Facebook social media entities are now back online. This, however, will not be the end of troubles for the social media giant. On the same day of the outage, Facebook was under the spotlight due to an appearance of a whistle-blower on 60 Minutes.
Haugen’s 60 Minutes interview on Sunday and testimony before the Senate subcommittee are only the beginning of a roadshow that will see the 37-year-old data scientist appear before UK politicians and the Web Summit event in Lisbon over the coming weeks. She is determined to fix Facebook, according to what she shared with the television programme. According to FT, she will be focusing on the following questions and issues going forward: What is Facebook doing to children? What happened to Facebook’s ‘civic integrity’ unit? How can Facebook improve content moderation? Are Facebook’s algorithms making things worse? Can anything be done to fix Facebook?
If she succeeds in her efforts to fix Facebook with the support of regulators, the economic impact will be severe for the social media giant.
