[imagesource: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images]

In case you hadn’t heard (given how many people get their news via social media), Facebook experienced a six-hour outage yesterday.

There was legitimate panic, especially at Facebook HQ where employees scrambled to fix what the company called “the result of a configuration change to its routers”.

That’s far too technical for my pay grade.

Mark Zuckerberg’s pay grade exists on an entirely different plane, with the Facebook founder becoming one of the richest humans on the planet over the past 15 or so years.

Yesterday’s outage did sting his bottom line, though, with Bloomberg reporting that he lost $6 billion (around R90 billion) in a matter of hours:

A selloff sent the social-media giant’s stock plummeting 4.9% on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September.

The stock slide on Monday sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to $121.6 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He’s down from almost $140 billion in a matter of weeks, according to the index.

As always, let’s not stress too much about tens of billions of dollars here and there when you consider the safety net the world’s five wealthiest people have to fall back on:

Image: Bloomberg

Another day at the top of the pile for Elon Musk. I wonder if he’s sent Jeff Bezos that giant statue yet?

If you go by the Forbes real-time billionaire tracker (in the Bloomberg versus Forbes battle I’m in the latter’s camp), Zuck is actually down to sixth place with a net worth of $116,8 billion, having fallen below Larry Ellison.

Ellison is the chairman, chief technology officer, and co-founder of software giant Oracle, and also serves on Tesla’s board.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin aren’t far behind, so if Zuck loses another $6 billion he’ll plunge down the list to eighth place.

No matter what happens, he’ll still have more than enough ‘f*ck you money’ to spend his Fourth of July holidays zooming around on his hydrofoil surfboard.

[sources:bloomberg&forbes]