Facebook outage cost retailers “thousands” in sales

Facebook’s biggest outage since 2009 has cost retailers all around the globe “thousands” in sales.

The site, alongside its sister apps WhatsApp and Instagram were inaccessible for more than six hour after users reported a major outage.

All three platforms offer shopping capabilities for thousands of businesses around the world and the outage left many unable to perform transactions.

“To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry,” Facebook said in a statement.

The social media giant has so far declined to comment on what caused the outage which affected billions worldwide.

Over 3.5 billion people worldwide use the three platforms to communicate, distribute material and expand their businesses.

The outage meant that businesses couldn’t trade for over six hours.

READ MORE: Facebook to consider building NFT products

“With Facebook being down we’re losing thousands in sales,” said Huh Clothing start-up founder Mark Donnelly told the New York Times.

“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.”

Another business owner who owns a food-delivery service in Delhi said he couldn’t communicate with his clients or fulfil his orders because he runs the business through Facebook and takes his orders through messaging platform WhatsApp.

“Everything is down, my whole business is down,” Samir Munir said to the New York Times.

It wasn’t just businesses that were affected by the outage, but those who use the platform to stream via Facebook Gaming also were unable to work.

Douglas Veney, who streams games under the alias GoodGameBro on Facebook said: “It’s hard when your primary platform for income for a lot of people goes down.”

Veney described the situation as “scary.”

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1 Comment. Leave new

  • Please don’t feel sorry for him company that manipulates young people and has done so for many years and most of the products on Facebook that are sold as substandard and safe and not tested Facebook has to become a responsible company but hundreds current leadership as is evident in the hearings in Washington all they think about is the bottom line so don’t rely your business future on Facebook it’s time just like eBay and PayPal to have a competitor To shake things up

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