By Faith Nyasuguta
African business owners that solely depend on social media platforms to spur their sales have revealed they incurred major losses during the Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outage.
According to experts, most e-commerce services that registered a massive growth in Africa during the Covid-19 were the most affected.
“Those who received the biggest hit are freelancers and owners of small stores, unlike big stores which have websites,” Digital marketing expert Karen Wambugu said.
Adding, she said: “When social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are not working, small stores cannot process their sales because they don’t have alternatives.”
A Kenyan businesswoman that runs an online and physical restaurant in the capital, Nairobi revealed that the outage happened at the busy dinner-time hours
“Literally, over 60 per cent of our orders come from our social media platforms. It was raining and it was only a few customers that could manage to get to our restaurant physically,” she told Africa Equity Media.
A separate South African online home interior business owner revealed that the outage came at a time when business would be booming, it would be at its peak on a normal day.
“In our approximation, we may have missed out on about 60 clients on Monday and now today (Tuesday), business is really down,” Kungao Nkosi said.
Internet monitoring firm Netblocks approximates that the outage could have cost the Sub-Saharan Africa economy about $19.8m.
At the same time, the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, lost nearly 7 billion dollars, while the social media platform lost shares after global failure by 5.5 percent.
NetBlocks further revealed that the global economy was losing $160 million per hour from the Failure, Bloomberg reports.
