The stock market price of Mark Zuckerberg’s American company fell on Monday after the massive outage that affected the group’s social networks. For several hours, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and Whatsapp were unusable by hundreds of millions of users worldwide.
A failure that has cost the digital giant dearly. The New York Stock Exchange ended Monday down sharply, weighed down by the technology sector, Facebook and fears of inflation.
According to final results at the close, the Dow Jones index lost 0.94% to 34002.92 points. The tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped 2.14% to 14255.46 points. The S&P 500 gave up 1.30% to 4300.46 points.
The Nasdaq‘s heavyweight, Facebook, plunged 4.89% to $326.23 on Monday. The technology company has been experiencing a series of setbacks for several months now. Last September, whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former engineer and product manager at Facebook, revealed numerous documents showing that the company was choosing profit over safety. Mark Zuckerberg and his company allowed certain celebrities, politicians and must-see internet users to bypass the rules on content moderation to which the rest of the users are subject.
For example, in 2019, football star Neymar was able to show his millions of followers photos that showed a naked woman accusing him of rape, before deleting them. Similarly, internal studies by the group have shown that its social network Instagram has negative effects on the morale of younger people, especially teenage girls.
Last night’s mega-panic was yet another blow to Facebook. The share price even fell by almost 6% during the day. Since its peak in early September, the stock has lost 15%.
In one session, because of the fall in its shares, the group’s wealthy co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, 37, lost 7 billion dollars in just a few hours, according to a count by Bloomberg, and even 19 billion since mid-September. Facebook is one of Wall Street‘s largest market capitalisations, and generally ranks behind Apple, Microsoft, Google (Alphabet) and Amazon.
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Featured photo : © Getty Images North America
