By
Mercy Tukiya Mutanya
February 2nd, 2024
The Facebook stock has risen approximately 23.27%, and 19.43% in the past year and YTD respectively.
Facebook Inc (NASDAQ: FB) stock closed yesterday trading at $326.23, down 4.89%. Facebook stock has now dropped approximately 8%, 13.3%, and 7.7% in the past three months, one month, and five days respectively through Monday. Following yesterday’s dip, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was reported to have lost over $6 billion in a few hours. Notably, the sudden dip recorded on Monday has been directly attributed to a global outage that affected Facebook and all its other subsidiaries: WhatsApp and Instagram. The company has not come out to explain the cause of the global outage that lasted for over six hours.
Yesterday’s outage reported across Facebook and its social media platforms was ostensibly the worst since 2008 when a bug knocked Facebook offline for about a day. However, the company only had 80 million users then compared to over 2 billion daily active users reported lately.
During the hours that Facebook and its social media platforms went offline, other platforms including Twitter and TikTok took advantage of welcoming more users. However, a debate of Web 3.0 that offers decentralized services and more freedom began in most social media platforms.
The outage on Facebook and its social media platforms followed an angling investigation over the company’s effect on teenagers, especially girls. The company was compelled to drop its initiative to build Instagram Kids due to pressure from parents and lawmakers.
The company has, however, apologized for the outage to its global users across different platforms. “To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry,” Facebook said in a statement. “We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.”
Facebook Stock amid the Outage
Despite the increased challenges in recent months, Facebook stock has risen approximately 23.27%, and 19.43% in the past year and YTD respectively through Monday.
The company has a market valuation of approximately $967.1 billion with 2.38 billion outstanding shares. However, approximately 2.37 billion are in public float according to market analytics provided by MarketWatch.
In the past 52 weeks, FB stock has ranged between $244.61 and $384.33. As of the time of reporting, FB shares traded around $327.40 during the after-hours trading session.
Although it has not been officially stated the reason for the outage, Facebook’s CTO Mike Schroepfer apologized for the technical issues.
“Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook-powered services right now,” Schroepfer wrote. “We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”