Prerana Toshniwal, Pune
A global outage hit Meta’s platforms- Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads impacting their billions of users worldwide on Tuesday, 5th March 2024. Due to this global outage Meta lost nearly $3 billion. According to NASDAQ, the Meta stock closed the March 5 trading session down 1.6% at USD 490.22. When the issues report started flooding on the internet, their share price fell by 1.5 per cent but it later slipped to 1.6. Moreover, the founder, chairperson and CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg lost over USD 2.79 billion in a day to USD 176 billion from his net worth according to Bloomberg Billionaire Net Worth. However, he still remains the fourth richest person in the world.
Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads faced outage leaving users unable to login to their accounts. Although some users were able to see previously posted content like stories and reels, most of them could not use the platforms entirely. Whatsapp business’ application programming interface was briefly facing some issues too as also indicated by Meta’s status dashboard. Nearly 200 users reported Whatsapp’s outage of Downdetector, a tool that tracks outages through status reports from several sources including users. Meta Quest users also faced issues logging into their headsets.
Elon Musk reacted to this global outage by joking on his X handle. He posted, “If you’re reading this, it’s because our servers are working.”
The company generates most of its revenue through the ads it runs on its various social media platforms. Due to the outage, the platforms also saw a drop in these earnings. Although Meta will not declare how the outage has affected their finances, it was reported that the loss was below $100 million USD. This is probably an insignificant amount to Meta as their annual revenue was roughly $ 134 billion in 2023.
There were some speculations that this might have been a cyber attack. Some reports also stated that the company’s internal systems were down which led to this outage also surfaced. Meta did not share much details and blamed this world wide outage on some “technical issues”.