Shortly after millions of Facebook and Instagram users encountered difficulties accessing their accounts, speculation quickly arose that a state-funded cyberattack might be to blame.
Mark Zuckerberg, fresh from a vacation in India, promptly took to Twitter, now X, to assure users that his security teams were diligently investigating the issue. He swiftly dismissed the notion of a cyberattack, citing Meta’s robust security measures designed to prevent such incidents.
The outage, which lasted from 10 am ET to 12 pm ET, is estimated to have cost the tech giant a staggering $100 million. With a potential impact on over 500,000 users globally, the outage posed a significant setback for the internet behemoth, which heavily relies on ad revenues and stock prices to maintain its market dominance.
Dav Ives, managing director at Wedbush Securities in New York, corroborated the financial impact, noting that the losses could have been even more severe had Meta not implemented prompt business continuity measures.
Curiously, the outage occurred just a day after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan made headlines for their fascination with a $10 million watch owned by Anant Ambani, the younger son of Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani. An extravagant pre-marriage celebration hosted by Ambani at Vantara, a National Initiative dedicated to animal welfare, had garnered attention in the media.
It’s worth noting that the outage was attributed to a technical glitch on the servers related to the application programming interface, as revealed by an engineer associated with the company on Reddit.
According to an update provided by CyberInt, the attack could have been the work of a trio hacking group comprising, Anonymous Sudan, Godzilla and Skynet and the act is yet to be investigated.
