Facebook Suffers Outage Amid Tech Stock Downdraft

It was hard to find a winner in the stock market on a day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 300 points and the tech-laden Nasdaq fell 2%. While investors are spooked about rising inflation, that wasn’t the only problem. A massive outage hit Facebook, crippling the platform and leaving users and employees of the company alike unable to connect.

Facebook shares tumbled nearly 5% after the social media giant suffered the worst outage that it has experienced in more than a decade. Not only Facebook was down but also its other platforms including Instagram and Whatsapp became no- man’s-land.

The last time Facebook was offline to the extent of Monday’s outage was in 2008 when its number of users hovered at 80 million. These days, Facebook’s user base is closer to 3 billion.

Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer took to Twitter to apologize for the outage. He blamed it on “networking issues,” saying that “teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.” As of Monday evening, service had still not been restored after being down since about noon.

*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

Kicked While Down

Facebook’s outage couldn’t have come at a worse time. The company was already reeling from a “60 Minutes” interview in which former employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen made major allegations against Mark Zuckerberg’s company suggesting it is more focused on growth than safety. Haugen, a former product manager, is scheduled to testify before a Senate panel on Oct. 5 about her allegations of how the platform placed teenage girls at risk.

Social Media Response

The Facebook outage made its way to social media platforms such as Twitter, where users took the opportunity to tout their own causes. Bitcoin market leaders such as economist Alex Krüger reminded followers that while centralized technology platforms might go down, bitcoin won’t because “it has no single point of failure.” Even Twitter’s main account joined in the chorus, welcoming “literally everyone” in a tweet.

hello literally everyone

— Twitter (@Twitter) October 4, 2021

WhatsApp, which was one of the platforms caught up in the outage, also chimed in on Twitter, the irony of which was not lost on followers including Jack Dorsey.

Loup Ventures managing partner Gene Munster told CNBC that Facebook’s problems will “blow over” and agreed that Zuckerberg is like “Teflon.” Facebook’s stock trades at a forward P/E ratio of 22.8x times, as per CNBC. Munster said he prefers Apple shares to Facebook in the current tech stock downdraft.