Mark Zuckerberg loses over $6 billion on Facebook outage, stock slumps 5%

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

An unprecedented global outage that kept Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp down for hours since October 4 evening, has left Mark Zuckerberg poorer by over $6 billion.

According to Bloomberg's Billionaire Index, the Facebook chief executive's wealth shrank to $122 billion because of the technical snag that pushed him below Bill Gates to the fifth spot on the index. Zuckerberg  has lost around $19 billion of wealth since September 13, when he was worth nearly $140 billion, according to the index.

Read | Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp reconnecting after nearly six-hour outage

A selloff sent Facebook's stock plummeting around 5 percent on October 4, adding to a drop of about 15 percent since mid-September.

Also read: Facebook encourages hate speech: Whistleblower

Facebook cited faulty configuration changes on its routers as the root cause of the nearly six-hour outage that prevented the company's 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.

"Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt," Facebook said in a blog post.

Also read | Facebook research reveals Instagram affects teenage girls negatively

Facebook is also battling a whistleblower's damning revelations. Many long-held fears and criticisms about the platform seem to have been backed up by its  own research, which ex-worker Frances Haugen has turned over to authorities and the Wall Street Journal.

Haugen, a 37-year-old data scientist from Iowa, has worked for companies including Google and Pinterest, but said in an interview with CBS news show 60 Minutes that Facebook was "substantially worse" than anything she had seen before.