Facebook's Hour-Long Blackout Cost About $1.2 Million Dollars

Yesterday around 12:30, Facebook went down for about an hour.

VentureBeat reports that Facebook, who reported $2.86 billion dollars from ad revenue in Q2 2014, lost about $20,000 for every minute the site was offline. This amounts to roughly $1.2mm dollars lost in the 60 or so minutes Facebook couldn't be accessed by its users.

Here's how they calculated:

This is a simple calculation: $2,680,000,000 divided by 3 months divided by 30 days, divided by 24 hours, divided by 60 minutes = roughly the ad revenue per minute, $20,700.

Now, this a drop in the bucket for their wealthy executive team. But what does the loss in revenue mean for Facebook itself? According to salary database, Glassdoor.com, Facebook pays between $85,000 to $753,000 for an engineer, with the average of $173,000.

So, if we assume an entire universe of users could not access the site for 10 minutes over the blackout period, that's roughly $200,000, or about the cost of an engineer.