Facebook stock plunged on Monday following an outage that prevented global users from accessing their accounts.
Facebook stock fell 4.9 percent on Monday, while CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth fell by roughly $7 billion on Monday according to Bloomberg. The entire S&P 500 fell by 1.3 percent on Monday, with the Nasdaq 100 dropping 2.2 percent and Dow Jones Industrial Average 0.9 percent.
The outage also blocked users from accessing accounts on Instagram and Whatsapp, which are both owned by Facebook. Stocks for other tech companies were also affected, with Google parent company Alphabet sliding 2.1 percent and Amazon shares falling 3 percent.
The problem followed an apparent change to Facebook’s routing information, Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, told the Wall Street Journal. The change appeared to make Facebook’s domain name system servers unavailable, essentially preventing computers worldwide from accessing the domain name facebook.com.
*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible
— Mike Schroepfer (@schrep) October 4, 2021
“*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now,” Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer wrote in a Twitter post. “We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”
Facebook employees struggled to fix the problem with the site because the company’s internal communications platform, known as Workplace, was also down, according to the New York Times. Workers were using other platforms, such as Zoom, to communicate with each other.