In a world of connectivity, being online is pretty important.
In the 2010 hit film The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg's depiction of technology magnate Mark Zuckerberg stressed a crucial point.
“Let me tell you the difference between Facebook and everybody else, we don’t crash ever."
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Well, it seems this isn’t strictly true in the real world as Facebook, Instagram and Threads all seemed to go down on Tuesday (March 5).
People certainly took notice after not being able to access some of the most popular social media apps.
Many users flocked to X to question whether anyone else was experiencing it too and what the issue could be.
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Down detector, a website dedicated to logging which websites are down and how many people are currently reporting issues, was overwhelmed with reports.
In just two hours, there were over 650,000 reports of Facebook not working.
For Instagram, Down detector received around 150,000 reports of Instagram not working.
Sure, it's bad for the users' experience, but on the companies side, the money is the big thing.
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Back in October 2021, Facebook and WhatsApp went down and Fortune estimated this brief outage (six hours) cost the company $100 million in revenue.
The site based the figure on Facebook’s second quarter earnings, which saw revenue of $29.08 billion over a 91-day period. That works out an average of $319.6 million per day or $13.3 million per hour.
Now that we are in 2024, and Facebook is likely charging slightly more for advertising, it is likely the company will see equally high costs.
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Although it is important to note Meta's social networks were down for only around two to three hours.
X account @whatdope also offered this estimated amount on how much it was costing the company per minute back in 2021.
“Last year’s ad revenue (for Facebook’s sites) was $84.2bn. So, for every minute it’s down, they’re losing around $160,000. Or, $2,670 per second,” they wrote.
Meta Spokesman Andy Stone has since taken to X to confirm to its users that the issues have now been resolved and that the websites should be working.
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Writing on X, he said: "Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience."
UNILAD has contacted Meta for comment.
Gerrard Kaonga