Facebook Outage Boosts Bitcoin’s Market Standing

Key Takeaways

• Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) was experiencing a multi-hour outage; its domain apparently had been deleted from global routing tables.
• The incident caused Bitcoin's market cap to surpass that of Facebook at various times on Monday.
• Bitcoin has overtaken Facebook's market cap at least twice this year, once in April and once in January.

Facebook was out of service for several hours on Monday, allowing Bitcoin to briefly overtake the company’s market capitalization yesterday.

Cause Of Outage Is Unclear

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

Facebook said that it was “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 seemed to have an internal cause. Facebook’s domain name was apparently deleted from global IP routing tables, something that could only be done from within Facebook itself. Meanwhile, employees reportedly were locked out of Facebook’s main building, suggesting that the company was keeping its systems under tight control.

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

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

Bitcoin Briefly Surpasses Facebook’s Valuation

Monday's outage led Bitcoin to overtake Facebook in terms of market cap yesterday. 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 (NASDAQ:AAPL), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Saudi Aramco (SE:2222), Alphabet A (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (Google), and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN).

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 swapped positions multiple times over the course of the day. As such, this standing was unlikely to last for long.

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