Earlier this week, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went down for a combined six hours, costing the platform over $60 million dollars in advertising revenue. The sites went down on Monday Oct 4th at noon Eastern time, and were largely restored at 7pm on the same day.
Fortune and Snopes were able to calculate the $60m loss by looking at annual revenues and calculating hour by hour and minute by minute rates. Facebooks earns about $220k in ad revenue per minute.
What isn't clear yet is whether this advertising spend was diverted in any way during the outage. Did demand for Google Ads spike during the outage, resulting in higher clearing prices for keyword searches, or was this revenue loss simply unspent and returned to advertising budgets to be spent later? It would be interesting to review keyword prices during the outage, to see whether there was any impact.
The drop in revenue was however very small in comparison to the drop in Facebook's share price. A day later, Facebook's share price is 3% lower, representing an almost $7b drop in valuation - showing the company's sensitivity to anything that might risk it's access to advertising revenue.
The outage comes at a terrible time for Facebook, given a whistleblower is currently testifying to Congress that Facebook is aware of the effects of its algorithms on young people and that misinformation is spreading across its platform, but is not acting on it because of the negative effects it may have on its income streams.
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