When It Goes Down, Facebook Loses $24,420 Per Minute

Polly Mosendz

At 6:52 p.m. Eastern, Facebook went down. (It began working again at 7:27 p.m.) This is the third such outage in the last several months, and it happens to coincide with the company’s announcement of impressive summer earnings.

The close proximity of outage and earnings makes some uncomfortable math possible.

In the third quarter, Facebook posted revenue of $3.2 billion. The third quarter lasts 91 days, from July 1 to September 30. This amounts to:

  • $35,164,835 per day

  • $1,465,201 per hour

  • $24,420 per minute

If we consider “revenue per minute” as a benchmark for potential losses, Facebook took a bit of a hit this evening. Their last outage, back in August, lasted for 19 minutes and lost them $426,607 (based on second-quarter revenue.) Using the same hypothetical math, this outage cost them a bit more—their third quarter was much more profitable, after all. Though it was down for just 35 minutes, Facebook lost $854,700 in revenue.

Of course, their third-quarter revenue included that August outage, so our loose math may not even be loose enough. And Facebook doesn’t actually have to fork over any cash to advertisers when they experience an outage—they just stop making it.

Regardless, it certainly seems like Facebook can take the hit.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/facebook-is-losing-24420-per-minute/382054/