Three major social media services owned by Mark Zuckerberg suffered an outage around the world on Monday, October 4, 2021, causing varying financial losses for not just the users but for Zuckerberg.

According to Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg lost more than $6 billion in personal wealth as the Facebook stock crashed by 4.9%, in addition to a 15% drop recorded two weeks ago.⁣

While experts speculate that the outage was a result of networking complications, many users were suddenly hit by the reality of the consequences of a monopolized market.

Since 2004, social media has grown in both popularity and reach. There is no denying that social media platforms are now a major source of not just news and information but a means to foster interactions between business owners and customers. Not only do they provide a platform for users to communicate beyond local and social boundaries, but they also offer countless possibilities to share user-generated content, like photos and videos. According to reports, about 48 percent of the current world population are social media users.

With a total of  3.78 billion (48% percent of the world population) social media users worldwide according to statistics in 2021, Zuckerberg’s Facebook leads the market as the most used platform with over 2.32 billion active monthly users.

WhatsApp follows closely with 2.0 billion active monthly users. Ranked the most used mobile messenger app in the world, statistics show that over 100 billion messages are sent each day on WhatsApp with an average user spending up to 38 minutes per day on the app. This platform was procured by Mark Zuckerberg back in 2014 as you well know.

With 1billion active users per month, Instagram, another of Zuckerberg’s strategic acquisitions, might not be have as much users as Facebook and Whatsapp, but it does not lack popularity especially in Nigeria. Data shows Instagram had about 8,676,000 active users in Nigeria as of January 2021.

Zuckerberg’s social media platforms take up more than half of the total users of social engines worldwide, no wonder the global panic as all three platforms shut down for nearly 5 hours on Monday.

Within those hours Zuckerberg’s platforms suffered downtime, open media sources shares that a good number of people moved to Twitter for information. While those in Nigeria without the luxury of VPN following the Twitter Ban, were left in the dark for some time. This total darkness experienced by avid users of Zuckerberg’s platforms is one of the many effects of monopolizing the market.

Even though the storm has passed and people can now continue their businesses and maybe count their losses, the idea that this blackout may be permanent one day or maybe more frequent could give rise to less dependency on Zuckerberg’s platforms and push for the rise of other social media platforms, as should be.