Mark Zuckerberg Loses $7B In Wealth From '60 Minutes' Whistleblower Interview, App Outage

Life has not been copacetic Monday for Mark Zuckerberg as the one-two punch of a damaging "60 Minutes" report followed by the Facebook FB platforms going offline resulted in $7 billion being erased from his personal wealth.

What Happened: Facebook's stock dropped by about 5%, an unhappy post-script to the 15% decline that has taken place since mid-September.

As a result of the stock’s tumble, Zuckerberg’s worth evaporated to $120.9 billion, which places him below Bill Gates in the fifth ranking on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Bloomberg added that Zuckerberg lost about $19 billion of wealth since Sept. 13, at a time when he was worth nearly $140 billion.

Related Link: Benzinga Stock Market Live Stream

Why It's Important: Facebook was rocked by a Sunday night bombshell interview on the CBS news show “60 Minutes” with Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager who said the social media company was aware its platform was being used to disseminate hate, violence and misinformation, but refused to change its algorithm to alter this situation.

Haugen leaked her information on Facebook’s operations to the Wall Street Journal last month, which published the data without identifying her by name. She came forward on “60 Minutes” to take responsibility for the leak.

"The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook, and Facebook over and over again chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money," Haugen said.

Going Down: Complicating matters is Monday's outage, which put the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms offline since shortly before noon. Facebook did not identify the cause of the problem, although several tech experts have pegged a Domain Name System (DNS) problem.

By 5:45 p.m. EDT, the platforms were back online.

FB Trading Action: Facebook closed trading at $326.31, a 4.87% decline. The company's 52-week trading range spans $244.61 to $384.33.

Photo: Christoph Scholz / Flickr Creative Commons.