This is how much Facebook and Instagram lost every minute during major outage

Facebook, Threads and Instagram went down on Tuesday (March 5) - and it will have cost Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta an eye-watering amount every minute.

Some social media users found themselves logged out of their Facebook accounts, along with Instagram accounts glitching. Facebook has seemingly locked out members from their accounts with notices showing that their sessions have expired.
Meanwhile, over on Instagram, feeds are failing to refresh and messages failing to send.

Downdetector, a service that monitors outages worldwide, is showing over 150,000 reports of Facebook failing. A further 26,000 reports show Instagram cutting out at the time of writing.

It's a hugely disruptive time for parent company Meta, and we can look back to a few years ago to see just how much of an impact it might make.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all went down in October 2021. At the time, YouTuber and podcaster Chris Williamson took to his Twitter to pose the following question about the platform’s earnings: “Can anyone estimate how much money Facebook will be losing per minute while all sites are down?”

In response to this tweet, Twitter account @whatdope offered this estimated amount:

“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,” they wrote.

Fortune also estimated that, as of the time the company announced it was coming back online, Facebook would have lost around $99.75 million in revenue.

The site based the figure on Facebook’s second quarter earnings, which saw revenue of $29.08 billion over a 91-day period. That works out an average of $319.6 million per day or $13.3 million per hour.

That’s a lot of money.

Facebook also experienced a significant 14-hour outage in 2019 that cost roughly $90 million.

According to a study by Gartner in 2014, the “average cost of downtime is $5,600 per minute”.

Indy100 reached out to Meta for comment

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