Zuckerberg loses billions as Facebook remains offline

It’s described as one of the longest downtimes Facebook has seen in years. If you try to connect to Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp right now you’re met with a "site can’t be reached" error.

Cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs a few hours ago backed what’s said to be the primary culprit explaining the outage at the social media giant.  

"The DNS records that tell systems how to find Facebook.com or Instagram.com got withdrawn this morning from the global routing tables."

Malik Earnest of iHeartMedia heard it described by insiders as network engineers pushed a configuration change that ended up locking everyone out, and that it was not some kind of cyberattack.

What does this mean? It means that the internet of things that Facebook relies on can’t operate.

Facebook "employees unable to enter buildings this morning to begin to evaluate extent of outage because their badges weren’t working to access doors" per Sheera Frenkel of The New York Times.

In their write-up they say the Facebook outage began around 11:40 am this morning. The outlet says the company’s top people are still trying to identify the exacts of the issue hours later.

"Some Facebook employees who had returned to working in the office were also unable to enter buildings and conference rooms because their digital badges stopped working. Security engineers said they were hampered from assessing the outage because they could not get to server areas."

According to Philip Crowther at the Associated Press, Facebook sources describe it as "mayhem" and "all internal systems are down too." They’re resorting to using alternative services and methods in order to communicate.

A team of Facebook staff are going to the company’s data center in Santa Clara, California to try and manually reset the site’s servers.

This widespread outage of the platform comes at a fragile time for Facebook as a company. A series of leaks published in the Wall Street Journal revealed that internal research into Instagram’s psychological impact on teens shows that they feel worse over time.

It led Facebook to pause their plans for a kids version of the app.

More recently former product manager Frances Haugen publicly revealed herself as the primary whistleblower in this recent spree of leaked information. She told the press that Facebook puts engagement and growth at a higher priority over caution of potential societal harms.

"To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true," said Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone in response.

The backlash hit Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth significantly. At the end of today he’s down nearly $7 billion USD according to Forbes. His value tied to the performance of Facebook stock which took a nearly five percent nosedive at the end of trading.