Huge amount of money Mark Zuckerberg will have lost after Facebook and Instagram went down

After a bit of a hairy moment today it seems as though most people are able to get back onto the social media platforms of Facebook and Instagram.

People all over the world discovered that they'd suddenly been logged out of their accounts, meaning that the social media sites were for all intents and purposes down.

Naturally this caused no small measure of panic and distress as everyone rushed over to X (Twitter) to try and be the first to joke that everyone was rushing over to X.

While Anonymous claimed this was all part of a 'cyber attack', Meta said on X that it was aware of a problem and was working to fix it.

It later announced that 'a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services' and that it had now been fixed.

Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Obviously this was catastrophic for everyone who relies on Facebook and Instagram, but how much might this have cost Meta in lost ad revenue?

As you might have guessed, Mark Zuckerberg's company has a rather stupendous amount of ad revenue coming in and we had a go at figuring out how much it might have missed out on.

Taking Meta's $38.7 billion (£30.46 billion) in ad revenue during the final quarter of 2023, that'd mean over a period of 92 days the company was earning be around $420 million (£330 million) per day.

Crunching that down to an hour gets you about $17.5 million (£13.78 million), which results in roughly $292,119 (£230,000) per minute.

If Meta's making roughly the same amount in ad revenue as it was doing in the last three months of last year then its social media sites going down could mean it's missing out on a fortune.

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Then again, the same Meta figures said it ended 2023 with $41.8 billion (£32.9 billion) in 'cash and cash equivalents' as part of its current assets so we doubt it's made that much of a dent in its finances.

It's a staggering amount of money which is frankly incredibly difficult to wrap one's head around.

All those clicks, comments and likes on Facebook and Instagram certainly add up to a massive amount of revenue for Meta, as the company estimated at its last earnings call that over three billion people use one of its sites on a daily basis, a truly staggering amount to comprehend.

LADbible has contacted Meta for comment.

Topics: Social Media, Facebook, Instagram, Meta, Money, Mark Zuckerberg

Joe Harker

Joe graduated from the University of Salford with a degree in Journalism and worked for Reach before joining the LADbible Group. When not writing he enjoys the nerdier things in life like painting wargaming miniatures and chatting with other nerds on the internet. He's also spent a few years coaching fencing. Contact him via [email protected]

@MrJoeHarker