The Meta outage that took down Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger on Tuesday, March 5, was reportedly a hundred-million-dollar issue for the company.
Dan Ives, managing director at New York’s Wedbush Securities, told DailyMail.com that Mark Zuckerberg lost approximately $100 million in revenue Tuesday morning due to the platforms being down worldwide.
Meta’s share price also fell by 1.5 percent when issue reports started flooding in around 10am ET, but it has since dropped by 1.6 percent.
The company generates most of its revenue through ads, which are shown to users, and with the ‘technical issues’ that took down the platforms, also dropped its earnings.
Meta will likely not reveal how much the outage cut into its finances, Ives told DailyMail.com: ‘This is a negligible amount of revenue that is likely below $100 million of lost revenue.’
The amount may be insignificant to Meta, which was roughly $ 134 billion in 2023, only 38 percent of the entire global population is worth $100 million.
Meta blamed the outage on ‘technical issues,’ leaving what actually happened shrouded in mystery.
A source inside Facebook told DailyMail.com that the company’s internal systems were also down, which may have led to the issues.
Facebook’s and Messenger’s glitches surfaced when users noticed they were kicked out of their accounts and unable to log back in – even with the right credentials.
Meanwhile, the News Feed on Instagram started showing an error message.
While the issues were fixed shortly after 12pm ET, many people are wondering how much it cost the social media giant.
The majority of issue reports cited problems with the apps – 72 percent for Facebook, 64 percent for Instagram, and Messenger is at 50 percent.
Some people experiencing issues initially thought their accounts may have been hacked, but there are more than 80,000 posts on X about Facebook and Instagram being down.
Musk responded to Meta’s outage with a post on X: ‘If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.’
It was also gathered that the two-factor authentication (2FA), which sends an SMS message with a code to a user’s phone for login, was not working.
Meta’s service dashboard, which lists its services, continued to show major disruptions for some features – but then switched to ‘Unknown’ for all or completely blank.
Jake Moore, tech expert and security advisor at ESET, said a cyberattack is unlikely but not impossible.
‘Facebook has a history of going down but this could be for a long list of reasons,’ he told MailOnline.
‘Although highly unlikely to be a cyber attack it can never be fully ruled out but it is far more likely to be yet another internal network problem.’
Kerri Lisenbigler, editor at TheRevOpsTeam, said the outage is an ‘annoyance’ but likely ‘nothing too serious’.
‘It’s not the first time this has happened and won’t be the last,’ she told MailOnline.
‘Large platforms such as Facebook and Instagram (and now Threads) manage an enormous amount of traffic and data every single hour of the day.
‘This means a minor glitch or human server room error can easily snowball into an outage affecting millions of users.
‘These things are only really a cause for concern should the teams at Meta not manage to get things back online within a few hours, that is when people will start speculating about the possibility of a cyberattack.’
