Social networks are a symbol of the modern age that dictate trends in the private and business life of modern man. They are always one click away from us and are an indispensable part of everyday activities. And what happens when they suddenly disappear, we had the opportunity to find out last week.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp stopped working on Monday for only 7 hours, causing confusion all over the world. Ironically, the company Facebook, which owns all the mentioned apps, was forced to post its announcement on the competing social network Twitter. In this announcement, they said that they have difficulties, although at the beginning they did not admit that it was a problem of global proportions.

Why did the crash happen?

Simply put, this happened because the Internet is made up of hundreds of thousands of smaller interconnected networks. Large companies like Facebook have their own networks also known as autonomous systems, and even if only one of these systems stops communicating with the wider Internet, there is a possibility for an outage.

A situation like this happened on Monday, causing the biggest outage in the history of social networks. In just a few hours, more than 10 million issues were reported, which was the largest number ever recorded.

This outage had a strong effect on individuals and businesses around the world. For many, the loss of access to Facebook services was just an inconvenience. But for small businesses without other reliable ways to communicate with customers, this was a serious problem.

What is certain is that the decline of social networks has caused damage to many, but also provided an opportunity for potential earnings in the financial markets, and in the following text, find out how!

What are the effects of the outage?

The drop meant ads didn’t show for more than six hours on Facebook’s advertising platforms. This has led to a reduction in the company's revenue and share price.

The event reduced the market value of the social media giant. Facebook stocks fell nearly 5% on Monday, and the company lost more than $ 47 billion in one day, as you can see in our infographic.

This blow to Facebook’s reputation comes at a difficult time. The company has previously come under the control of regulators around the world because of the way it responds to issues such as misinformation, hate speech and user data management.

The net wealth of co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg also fell by $ 4 billion. The net worth of the fifth richest person in the world is now estimated at $ 124 billion.

Although the outage had a negative impact on the company, the share price went upwards later in the week and continued to grow. However, the fear that this situation may happen again remains and investors are likely to be vigilant for time to come.