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Mark Zuckerberg loses billions in net worth amid Facebook outage, whistleblower news

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth tumbled by billions of dollars within hours as his social networks went offline and a whistleblower prepared to testify before Congress.

According to Bloomberg, the 37-year-old social media magnate’s worth fell by at least $6 billion – to $121.6 billion – as Facebook shares plunged 4.9% on Monday. Forbes reported similar figures, saying Zuckerberg’s fortune dropped to $117 billion – a $5.9 billion decline. The new numbers put him at No. 5 on Bloomberg’s list of the world’s richest people, behind Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault and Bill Gates.

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The news came as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp suffered a worldwide outage that began shortly before noon Monday, according to The Associated Press. The services began to come back online about six hours later.

>> Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp services being restored slowly, company confirms

“We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change,” the company said in a blog post Monday night. “We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”

Meanwhile, whistleblower Frances Haugen, who worked as a product manager for Facebook, was slated to testify before a U.S. Senate subcommittee Tuesday, according to the AP.

“Facebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety,” she said in a “60 Minutes” interview Sunday, adding that she doesn’t trust that the company is “willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous.”

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– The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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