Facebook is at the center of controversy for its mishandling of user data. Facebook’s share tumbled Monday, adding to a drop of about 15% since the company said in mid-September that it mishandled user data.
Facebook’s stock dipped 4.9% on Monday after the social media company said it would be taking steps to better protect user data.
Following revelations that political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had improperly accessed information on as many as 87 million Facebook users.
The selloff comes amid a growing uproar over Facebook’s handling of user data.
Its role in swaying elections around the world with critics calling for tighter regulation and oversight.
While Facebook was down, Mark Zuckerberg’s Wealth Plummeted
Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth has fallen dramatically, but he remains one of the world’s wealthiest people.
Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder, and CEO of Facebook lost more than $6 billion in net worth in a few hours on Monday following a drop in Facebook’s stock price.
After its site went down for several hours due to an outage caused by an internal configuration change. The plunge knocked him off Forbes’ list of the world’s top 5 wealthiest people overnight.
This is not the first time Facebook has experienced outages.
Last year, the company announced it had identified a bug that resulted in people being logged out of their accounts without warning or any form of identification.
Facebook was down on Monday
Facebook’s stock plunged on Monday. The company’s shares dropped 4.9% on Monday following its weekend trading suspension, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September.
Facebook was down for hours due to an issue with its infrastructure that caused some users to have trouble accessing the site or logging into their accounts on Monday morning.
Investors were concerned about Facebook’s downtime
Investors were not pleased after Facebook’s stock slide on Monday. The company lost billions of dollars in its market value and Zuckerberg’s net worth plunged.
He is now worth $121.6 billion. Knocking him from the fifth richest person to the sixth richest person in the world.
Facebook has had a tough year with data breaches, fake news controversies, and issues with its algorithms. Which have led to many people deleting their accounts.
It’s no surprise that Facebook is down for hours due to technical issues. They are still not able to produce revenue to be profitable after all these years of being in the business.
On Sept. 13, it took the company hours to fix a major bug that left users across the globe stranded without their usual access to Facebook.
The bug was found in Facebook’s code library called React. The library is responsible for how data are rendered when users visit Facebook pages in their browser or mobile apps. So when the library broke, almost everything broke with it. The social media giant said in a blog post that this was “the worst outage we’ve experienced in years.”
The Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that Facebook had been collecting data from millions of people without their consent.
This led to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress about how the company plans to handle its user’s data in the future.
On Monday, October 4th, Facebook and Instagram went down for more than 7 hours. The company first acknowledged the problems at 12:13 PM ET, but it took some time before both of them were back online.
It’s not yet clear what caused the error and how it was resolved. But as of now, Facebook has apologized on Twitter and said that everything is back to working as expected.
