Down time on FB “costs” Mark Zuckerberg $6 billion

Users worldwide were shocked to find Facebook, Instagram and Whats App ‘down’ and completely unusable yesterday afternoon, from around 4.30pm Western European time.

With all 3 platforms offline until around 11pm last night, the world economy is estimated to have lost lost more than $950 million after more than six hours of technical problems suffered by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s company. The business mans personal wealth is said to have dropped by more than six billion dollars.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a sell-off sent Mark Zuckerberg’s shares down 4.9% on Monday, plus the drop of about 15% since mid-September when the tech giant had $140 billion, means Zuckerberg’s value is down to $121.6 billion, just below Microsoft founder Bill Gates who holds the No. 5 posititon.

However, with social media paralyzed, it apparently wasn’t just Mark Zuckerberg who suffered. The non-governmental organization NetBlocks, which focuses on cybersecurity, has calculated a “rough estimate” that the global economy lost $160 million due to lost revenue from Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp in just 6 hours of down time.