Losing money due to social networking problems

Facebook shares fell about 5 per cent on Monday due to a long shutdown affecting the social media giant, as well as Facebook-owned Instagram and Whatsapp.

Facebook's falling share price has cost co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who owns about 15% of the company, more than $6 billion in personal wealth, putting him one notch lower in the ranking of the world's richest people.

According to Forbes' real-time billionaire list, the drop has moved Zuckerberg from 5th to 6th on the list of the world's richest people with a new fortune of $116.8 billion, behind Lawrence Ellison at $117.5 billion. Bill Gates ranks 4th with a net worth of $128.8 billion, followed by Bernard Arnault in 3rd place with $173.3 billion, Jeff Bezos in 2nd place with $186.6 billion and the richest man in the world Elon Musk with $201.2 billion.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went offline at around 11am on Monday and the outages continued after the shutdown.

Meanwhile, rumours have emerged about the possibility of a massive hack of the social media giant.

Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer said on Twitter during the outage, "Sincere apologies to anyone who is affected by the outage of Facebook-backed services right now."

Facebook announced it was back online around 6:30pm EST.

But the outages weren't the only events around Facebook that may have played a role in Monday's sell-off. In an interview that aired on Sunday night, former Facebook employee turned whistleblower Frances Haugen criticised the social media giant on 60 Minutes, accusing the company of "tearing our societies apart".

"Facebook has realised that if they change the algorithm to make it more secure, people will spend less time on the site, they will click fewer ads, they will make less money," Haugen said. "Facebook has demonstrated time and time again that it prefers profit over security."

In response to the interview, Facebook said in a statement that they "continue to make significant improvements in the fight against the spread of misinformation and malicious content" and that "offering to encourage bad content and doing nothing is simply not true."