Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg loses 3 billion USD after social media disrupts on March 5

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg lost nearly USD 3 billion in a day after the company’s flagship platforms Facebook ad Instagram faced a global outage. Zuckerberg’s net worth declined by USD 2.79 billion in a day to USD I76 billion on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, but he maintained his position as the fourth richest person in the world.

Following the hour-long global outage, the shares of Meta declined 1.6 percent leading to the erosion in Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth. Meta shares closed the overnight trading session on Wall Street at USD 490.22 apiece.

The users of Facebook, Instagram and Threads experienced difficulties accessing the social media platforms on the night of March 5, 2024. Additionally, the Meta Quest users encountered issues logging into their headsets. Many YouTube users faced errors while using the platforms. It also affected WhatsApp and Threads.

This outage also caused a lot of frustration and confusion among users as the faced issues like feed failure and message sending problems. Experts have now found the exact figure of the money that Zuckerberg lost. He lost USD 100 million in income on March 5, 2024, as a result of the platforms going down all over the world.

During the outage, the users reported encountering failure to load error pages on both Instagram and Facebook. Some Instagram users noted that they could still view older stories despite the error. However, many Facebook accounts were automatically logged out during the outage.

During the outage, the social media platform, X was flooded with posts from affected individuals. X owner, Elon Musk even mocked rival Meta after its flagship platforms suffered an outage. “If you a reading this post, it is because of our servers are working,” Musk posted on X.

All of Meta’s owned social media platforms faced technical glitches similar to those in 2021, resulting in a seven-hour outage. However, the issue was resolved in just two hours.

The outage occurred shortly before the deadline to adhere to the new Digital Markets Act of the European Union. It has been speculated that Meta was making changes to comply, which could have led it to coding errors that caused outage.

Meta was making changes like allowing users to separate their Facebook and Instagram accounts to prevent combining personal data for targeted ads. It is still unclear whether the outage is connected to Meta’s preparation for the DMA of the European Union (EU).