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In case you were living under a rock and missed it, Facebook and Instagram went down yesterday.
Hundreds of thousands of people took to the website Downdetector, which tracks online outages, to report issues with Meta-owned platforms Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and Threads.
Luckily, everything is now back up and running again - with Andy Stone, Meta’s head of communications, taking to X (formerly Twitter) to say that the whole palaver had been caused by a "technical issue".
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It's not the first time that Facebook and Instagram have gone down, and we'd hazard a guess that it won't be the last.
This is the nature of websites and services - they'll have outages. Back in 2021, a similar technical glitch set people speculating about just what the impact of such down periods might be on Meta's bottom line (which hadn't yet changed its name from Facebook at the time).
This was what prompted YouTuber Chris Williamson to ask his followers: "Can anyone estimate how much money Facebook will be losing per minute while all sites are down?"
It's not the sort of question you might think you could possibly answer, but another user did some quick math to try figure an estimate out based on the revenue that Facebook had reported from advertising the previous year.
They speculated: "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."
Last year's ad revenue (for facebook's sites) was $84.2bn.
— 👽 ♫ I'm dopé, I hope you're dopé, too ♫ 👽 (@WhatDope) October 4, 2021
So, for every minute it's down, they're losing around $160,000. Or, $2,670 per second.
Now, it's important to note that this is just one person's guess and it's pretty much impossible to work out just how accurate the numbers might be.
Needless to say, the sheer amount of money that Meta makes from advertising when its services are all working is undeniable - so it stands to reason that it might lose a whole chunk of change when people can't log on.
It underlines how huge the consequences might be for the company, from what feels to us like a fairly minor period of disruption.
Since Mark Zuckerberg's personal fortune is heavily tied to how Meta fares financially, too, it could have an impact on his net worth, which currently sees him sitting in fourth place in Bloomberg Billionaires Index, lagging behind Amazon's Jeff Bezos in the top spot.
