The global economy has a recorded a loss worth billions of dollars as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram went down at about 4.42pm yesterday, Monday, 4th.
According to reports from NetBlocks, the authority in charge of tracking internet outages and their impact, the outage by these three social giants had already cost the global economy about $160m per hour.
Records have shown that Facebook’s stocks had gone down about 5.5 per cent. It also recorded that the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg had lost nearly $7bn since the beginning of the outage yesterday.
This isn’t the first time the social network platform has recorded an outage. Records shows that Facebook shut down for 24 hours in 2019, its biggest outage till date. 
There have been speculations pointing to the outage being caused by a domain name server failing, the naming structure that forms the web’s infrastructure.
According to reports from Independent, Facebook’s DNS problems were only a symptom.
It added that the system could not have broken down spontaneously, and it was likely that something had happened to the underlying infrastructure that had stopped it from working.
For hours yesterday, users were unable to send messages or load new content on the mobile apps for these platforms. Also, while navigating through Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp websites, a server error message appeared, which indicated there was an issue with Facebook’s servers.
Facebook and its affiliate social networks have a total of 2.9billion monthly active users.