On 4 October, something unbelievable happened. Facebook and all its services including Instagram, Whatsapp, and messenger got to disappear from the internet for 7 hours. This was one of the biggest outages in Facebook history. Facebook stopped completely and we couldn’t even react to posts. Here is the story, causes, and effects of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg


Story:

Almost everyone who uses the internet use Facebook but on October 4, 2021, Facebook users got shocked when they saw that none of the Facebook services is working for almost seven hours. This was big news. Users were totally confused that whether the issue is their internet or the server is down. Millions of users came to Twitter to confirm. 

Twitter was only the platform left where Facebook can tweet to tell the situation. More than one million tweets were posted on the topic. Most of them were memes and making fun of Facebook. 

Causes:

3.5 billion users were affected cause of this outage. The Facebook authority told that the issue was due to a “faulty configuration change”. It was like the whole Facebook got vanished from the internet. 

Some local journal was publishing some stories Facebook harms and wrote that Facebook knew that its products are harming teenage girls and kids mentally. 

The reports were noticed by the Government. On the day of the outage, the whistleblower of Facebook, Frances Haugen revealed her identity. She applied for whistleblower protection and showed the reports and some internal documents to Facebook but Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg were not wanted to change their algorithm because it would affect their Ads conversion and earnings.

It was the whistleblower, Frances Haugen who presented the papers that Instagram is harmful to teenage mental health.

Effects:

The owner of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg who was in 5th place on the world’s richest people list fell to 6th place with the loss of $6 billion after Facebook faced a massive outage. It has been reported that the whistleblower of Facebook revealed his identity which became one of the major causes of the Facebook outage.

Now, Mark Zuckerberg is standing in 6th place in the world’s richest people list. His personal wealth is now about $120 billion. Share of Facebook hurtled about 6%. 

The news and memes about Facebook down and Facebook outage spread like a wildfire. Some theorists said that the outage is due to a huge hack but the chances of hacking Facebook are negligible. Facebook blog wrote that outage was due to a glitch in routers. Facebook blamed the whole scenario on the “faulty configuration change”. 

Facebook said that the issue will be resolve in few times but it took about 6-7 hours. People were saying that a big cyber attack happened to Facebook but that wasn’t true.