Mark Zuckerberg loses R6.8bn amid Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram outage

Mark Zuckerberg has lost his position as the 5th most richest person in the world amid the global outage of social media giants, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Following worldwide complaints from people who could not access their social media accounts, Facebook took to Twitter to announce that it was aware of the problem and was working to resolve it.

“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Facebook app. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologise for any inconvenience.”

With the outage taking longer than anticipated to resolve, it seems to have hit its CEO in the pocket.

At the time of publishing, Forbes’ list of today’s winners and losers reported a 6.8-billion loss for Zuckerberg, losing his spot in the top five richest people.

 Meanwhile, Twitter is having a field day as it throws shade on Facebook’s outage.

“Hello literally everyone,” it tweeted, celebrating that everyone who could not access other social media networks were spending their time on Twitter.

Commenting on the tweet, the official Genius World Record account said the record for most people on Twitter at once had probably been “smashed”.

The major outage hitting all three platforms, which have billions of users, is rare though apps are regularly forced offline by technical problems. 

Other networks have seen a surge in users as the outage persisted for several hours.

“Signups are way up on Signal (welcome everyone!),” the messaging app, wrote on Twitter, which was still functioning.

“We also know what it’s like to work through an outage, and wish the best for the engineers working on bringing back service on other platforms,” it added.

Facebook has not communicated on the possible cause of the outage, but cyber security experts noted they had found signs that online routes that lead people to the social giant were disrupted.

“Facebook and related properties disappeared from the Internet in a flurry of BGP updates,” tweeted John Graham-Cumming, the chief technology officer at web company Cloudflare.

He added that minutes before the services went offline “we saw a large number of … changes (mostly route withdrawals)”.

Compiled by Vhahangwele Nemakonde. Additional reporting by AFP