Facebook Lost About $65 Million During Hours-Long Outage Face | N.S.A. (News|Stories|Analytics)

Facebook Lost About $65 Million During Hours-Long Outage

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went dark Monday—bringing the economic engine of Facebook, Inc. to a halt.

The outage began around 12:30 eastern and ended a little more than five hours later. So how much damage did that do to Facebook?

Here’s a back-of-the-envelope estimate: about $65 million. To get here, I reasoned that since Facebook brought in $29.1 billion in revenue during the second quarter, it’s collecting about $970 million a month in sales. About $313 million per day—or roughly $13 million per hour. (Like the ads business itself, my math isn’t perfect: It doesn’t account for weekly, monthly or seasonal timeframes where Facebook could be earning a little more or less.)

The outage took a bigger hit on CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal figures. As Facebook stock slid 4.8% in trading Monday, Zuckerberg’s fortune declined by $5.9 billion. (He remains the world’s sixth richest person.)
Facebook’s mighty business model, the one capable of generating almost a billion dollars a day in revenue, will be shoved into the spotlight by Congress Tuesday morning. Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former product manager at the company, will testify before a Senate subcommittee and detail allegations that Facebook ignored internal research about how its platforms promote toxic content and harm their users.