The shares of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) dropped by 5% Monday as the company was hit by a massive outage on the Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp applications. The service went offline just one day after a “60 Minutes” interview with whistleblower Frances Haugen, who has accused the company of prioritizing profit over users.
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Sound Impact Of Facebook’s Massive Outage
As reported by CNBC, Facebook suffered its biggest outage since 2008 as its main applications were offline. The DownDetector website tracked the issue in several countries in , Asia, and Latin America, and also Canada, Australia, and the U.S.
Users in these regions could not make use of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp as the company servers went down. Back in 2008, the service was unavailable for nearly a whole day, affecting 80 million accounts.
Facebook stock plunged 5% on Monday, adding up the 15% dive in mid-September. Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth also took a dent of $ 6.6 billion, dropping him to sixth place on the billionaire list in just a few hours.
“The market was broadly down Monday, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite dropping over 2%. The decline was particularly sharp among social media stocks, as Twitter, Snap, and Pinterest each fell more than 5%,” CNBC reports.
The outage adds up to the company’s blazing controversy triggered by The Wall Street Journal revelations on how the company allegedly prioritizes profit over the welfare of its users.
“60 Minutes”
In a scouring interview on Sunday, Frances Haugen, former project manager at Facebook was revealed as the company’s whistleblower who filtered thousands of pages as part of The WSJ’s investigation.
For years, she was involved in civic integrity issues within the internet giant, and said internal research shows that Facebook is aware of how its platforms help spread hate, violence, and misinformation, and it has tried to hide that evidence, CNN Business reports.
During the interview, Haugen said, “The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook, and Facebook over and over again chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”
Haugen had filed around eight documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to expose the company, which also had a tough session before the Senate Commerce Subcommittee over similar allegations.
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