Facebook Outage Boosts Bitcoin's Market Standing

Key Takeaways

• Facebook is experiencing a multi-hour outage; its domain has apparently been deleted from global routing tables.
• The incident caused Bitcoin’s market cap to surpass that of Facebook at various times today.
• Bitcoin has overtaken Facebook’s market cap at least twice this year, once in April and once in January.

Facebook has been out of service for several hours, allowing Bitcoin to briefly overtake the company’s market capitalization today.

Cause of Outage Is Unclear

The incident has affected not just Facebook’s main site but also its secondary apps, WhatsApp and Instagram.

Facebook has said that it is “aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products” and that it is “working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”

The outage seems to have an internal cause. Facebook’s domain name has apparently been deleted from global IP routing tables, something that could only be done from within Facebook itself. Meanwhile, employees have reportedly been locked out of Facebook’s main building, suggesting that the company is keeping its systems under tight control.

The outage does not seem to be the result of external actors, as in the case of a DDOS attack, nor does it seem to be the result of external service failures such as CDN/DNS outages.

While commenters have speculated on the possibility of internal sabotage or a system reconfiguration gone wrong, the exact nature of the problem is still unclear.

Bitcoin Briefly Surpasses Facebook’s Valuation

Today’s outage led Bitcoin to overtake Facebook in terms of market cap today. While Facebook sunk to a valuation of $923 billion at one point, BTC’s market cap briefly hit $929 billion.

That left Bitcoin as the sixth-largest asset on AssetDash, following Apple, Microsoft, Saudi Aramco, Alphabet A (Google), and Amazon.

Bitcoin previously surpassed Facebook’s market cap at least twice this year. Those events were highlighted by Gemini’s Cameron Winklevoss in January and Binance’s Changpeng Zhao in April.

Rapidly changing prices mean that these assets have swapped positions multiple times over the course of the day. As such, this standing is unlikely to last for long.

Disclaimer: At the time of writing this author held less than $75 of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and altcoins.

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