Let's Calculate How Much Money Facebook Just Lost During Today's Outage

Polly Mosendz

Today around noon, Facebook went down. The earth kept spinning, shockingly, but Facebook was unavailable. For some users, it would not load at all. For others, it showed the ominous message, "Sorry, something went wrong." 

In the second quarter, Facebook had posted revenue of $2.91 billion. The second-quarter lasts 90 days, from April 1 to June 30. That's $32,333,333 a day. That's about $1,347,222 per hour. That's $22,453 per minute. Not too shabby. It looks like the outage lasted from from about 12:08 p.m. to 12:27 p.m.. So for the 19 minutes no one could use it, Facebook just lost roughly $426,607. 

Considering how much Facebook earns every day, it is a tiny hit, but nonetheless, not too many companies can lose almost half a million in less than a half hour. 

On the other hand, Twitter jumped:

Facebook's last outage, which was overnight this past June and lasted about a half hour, also cost the company about half a million dollars. 

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While this Facebook outage was only about twenty minutes, panic set in for many users right away. A police department in California reported countless phone calls regarding the outage:

Sergeant Burton Brink of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department went onto to explain, "We get calls all the time like this, cable TV, all sorts of things not working, they think we control." Facebook's control center is just a bit further north than L.A., and we don't believe Marc Zuckerberg is personally fielding any outage calls. 

This article was originally published at http://www.thewire.com/technology/2014/08/lets-calculate-how-much-money-facebook-lost-on-todays-outage/375462/

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