Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg saw his personal wealth fall by nearly $7 billion following a downtime experienced by his apps on Monday.
WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram were inaccessible for a record seven hours by users worldwide.
The incident knocked Mr Zuckerberg down a notch on the list of the world’s richest people after a whistleblower came forward accusing the firm of prioritising profit over safety.
The stock slide sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to $120.9 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He has lost about $19 billion of wealth since September 13 when he was worth nearly $140 billion, according to the index.
The social tools including Facebook’s own Messenger service were first reported as not being available from 04:25pm on Monday, leaving online users frustrated and unable to connect all over the world.
The apps then notified its billions of users on Twitter that they were “working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”
In a second tweet at 11:46pm when the services were restored, chief technology officer at Facebook Mike Schroepfe wrote, “Facebook services coming back online now – may take some time to get to 100%. To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I’m sorry.”
Also, taking to Facebook, Zuckerberg wrote around midnight, “Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”
The Facebook-owned apps reported outages in March 2021 and July 2020 but both were resolved within an hour.
