Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp recently faced a major outage that affected billions of people worldwide. Businesses were disrupted, communications were cut off and lives were impacted by the crisis faced by this one company. The distress, chaos, and confusion that followed simply emphasized the level of dependency that the world has on Facebook and its family of apps.
It took Facebook’s team of developers and engineers 5-6 hours to restore their services and get the apps up and running again. Facebook has reassured its users that hackers are not the cause of the issue and user data was not impacted. However, the outage has affected a huge community of people who rely on various Facebook tools for personal and professional use. The people most hardest hit are the small businesses and creators who are highly dependent on the Facebook family of apps for their income.
While Facebook has apologized for the outage, it will also face financial losses ad revenue as well as experiencing a drop in its social media stocks. Fortune has estimated that Facebook will face a loss of $100m in revenue from the disruption to all its apps. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, also saw his net worth plunge by an estimated $7 billion.
Effects Of Outage
Internally, Facebook’s employees were also severely affected by the outage. This is especially so because Facebook’s IT system is highly reliant on Facebook. Various internal tools that the employees used to communicate with each other were also taken down. This added to the obstacle that Facebook faced to get its services working again.
Facebook and Instagram ads were also affected and businesses and brands found themselves unable to communicate with their customers. The fact that Whatsapp and Instagram were very closely integrated into Facebook further highlighted the interdependency of its services. Facebook has also acknowledged the severity of the issue. According to NY Times, Facebook’s global security operations center has determined the outage as being “a HIGH risk to the People, MODERATE risk to Assets and a HIGH risk to the Reputation of Facebook”.
Lesson For Business
Next to Facebook’s internal eco-system being affected, the users who use Facebook for business purposes also lost much revenue from this outage. The NY Times has reported on various small business owners from Ireland and India whose businesses were seriously affected. For Mark Donelly, a start-up founder, he described the scary experience below
“With Facebook being down we’re losing thousands in sales…It may not sound like a lot to others, but missing out on four or five hours of sales could be the difference between paying the electricity bill or rent for the month.”
This is extremely worrying for small businesses, and further emphasizes the need to be adaptable in times of crisis. While it is important to be present on popular networks such as Facebook, it is also important to establish your brand and business across other platforms as well. Facebook may be the primary means of communication, but it is necessary to set up other secondary means of communication to ensure the integrity of your digital assets.
