The developer, Mark Zuckerberg, lost more than six billion dollars by the fact that Facebook and other social networking applications under his purview (Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp) stopped working, this Monday (4).

Zuckerberg has dropped one rung on the list of the world's richest people, due to the worldwide blackout that lasted more than six hours. A sell-off caused the tech giant's shares to fall yesterday by 4.9%, adding to a drop of about 15% recorded since mid-September.

"We are aware that some people are having problems accessing the Facebook application," the company wrote on its Twitter account. And the same tweet read, "We are working to get things back to normal as soon as possible and apologize for any inconvenience."

With this drop Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg now has a fortune valued at $121.6 billion, falling below Microsoft founder Bill Gates in fifth place in the Bloomberg Billionaires index. This ranking indicated that Zuckerberg had about 140 billion dollars until last September.  

The drop in value coincides with a series of Wall Street Journal reports featured since September 13. The reports revealed that Facebook knew about problems with its products. Among them, that of Instagram causing damage to the mental health of teenagers and spreading misinformation about events on Capitol Hill in January 2021.

The network outage has negatively affected other institutions, such as the non-governmental cybersecurity organization NetBlocks. It estimated that the global economy is losing $160 million due to lost revenue from Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. The global economy lost more than 950 million dollars, after the more than six hours of technical problems on Facebook.