Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has dropped by almost $7 billion in the past few hours, hit by the combination of a whistleblower coming forward and outages worldwide for Facebook and its flagship products.
Bloomberg said, “A selloff sent the social-media giant’s stock plummeting around 5% on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September.”
Zuckerberg’s worth has now fallen to $120.9 billion, placing him below Bill Gates, at No. 5, on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Meanwhile, social media services Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are back up and running after an outage that lasted almost six hours.
Facebook blamed an internal technical issue, which not only affected Facebook’s services, but reportedly also employees’ work passes and email.
The services were down from about 16:00 GMT until around 22:00.
But the company said there was “no evidence that user data was compromised”.
