The problem of logging out user accounts of Facebook, Messenger and Instagram last night (March 5) could cause parent company Meta to lose about 100 million USD in revenue.
The social media giant makes most of its profits from advertising on the platform, so a “technical problem” that crashes the system would also reduce overall revenue.
Financial expert Dan Ives, director of Wedbush Securities, estimates losses will be about 100 million USD after the Meta ecosystem (including: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger) failed to access globally.
Also in the trading session on March 5, shares of technology giant Meta fell about 1.5%.
Netizens “made” photos of Mark Zuckerberg watching users run to rival platforms to find out why Facebook and Instagram collapsed.
Meta will almost certainly not disclose financial losses after the incident, but the figure of 100 million USD is “insignificant” compared to total revenue of 134 billion USD (in 2023).
In an official statement, Meta communications director Andy Stone confirmed that the company’s platform had a technical problem that was quickly fixed by engineers.
DailyMail’s anonymous source said Meta’s internal system also crashed overnight, and that may be the cause of the known user account logout problem.
According to statistics, the majority of error reports appear on applications, specifically 72% for Facebook, 64% for Instagram and 50% for Messenger. On social network X (formerly Twitter), there are more than 80,000 posts about social networks Facebook crashed during the time the incident occurred.
“You are reading this post because our servers are still up and running.” Elon Musk, the billionaire who owns X, does not forget to “kick” his opponents.
The Internet also spread a “conspiracy theory” that the incident was the result of a cyber attack that took place on “Super Tuesday” (big Tuesday) when US states held votes to elect delegates. participate in the party convention, where candidates to run for President in 2024 of the Democratic and Republican political parties will be selected.
Jake Moore, technology expert and security consultant at ESET, said that Meta’s incident was unlikely to be due to hacking but it was not impossible. “Facebook has also crashed in previous years, the possibility of hacking cannot be ruled out, but it is more likely due to internal network problems.”
Meanwhile, Kerri Lisenbigler, editor at TheRevOpsTeam, said “the incident is nothing serious.”
“Large platforms like Facebook and Instagram have to handle huge amounts of data and traffic every hour, and even a little carelessness on the part of a human in the server room can create an outage affecting millions of users. ”, Kerri said. “The possibility of a hack is only mentioned if Meta cannot recover from the problem within a few hours.”