News analytics can provide valuable perspective.

Last week’s outage of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other applications was a huge news event.

But it was only the biggest story for Facebook in three years and only the fourth biggest news event in the last five years.

In 2018, the company had two huge news events, a revenue miss and the Cambridge Analytica story. The year before there was the decision to accept political ads from Russian sources.

The chart leverages data from Bloomberg’s news archive, a database of 4 billion headlines that ran on the terminal during the past decade.

The chart can be replicated typing {NT FB <go>} and toggling the date range on the professional Bloomberg platform. #facebook