There was a massive disruption in Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram services recently. What was the impact of the Facebook, Whatsapp outage on Indian businesses? Let's find out
Social media services Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were recently hit by an outage that lasted almost six hours.
Given that it was night in India at the time of the outage, it may not have had as much impact here as in other places. But it should make businesses and policymakers consider how essential companies like Facebook and Google are to the economy.
Businesses, especially, should consider the risks involved, since so many of them depend heavily on just two or three such platforms.
Let's look at some numbers involved just with Facebook’s family of services.
According to PIB and the Ministry of Electronics and IT, India had 410 million Facebook users, 530 million WhatsApp users, and 210 million Instagram users as of February this year.
Data from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India show that the total number of internet users in the country stood at 825.30 million at the end of March 2021. So, that implies just under 50 per cent of India's internet users are also Facebook users. One-fourth of them also use Instagram. And, at least 64 per cent of them are WhatsApp users, too.
The risks that an outage of services like these poses isn't just about not being able to post your latest selfie or vacation pictures on social media. There may be a deeper problem.
As of April of 2019, an estimated 1.5 million small and medium businesses, or SMBs, from India were reported to be using Facebook in order to reach out to customers. This was just 10 months after Facebook had said in June of 2018 that it had 900,000 SMBs on board from India. That gives a sense of how quickly and by how much that number has been growing.
No comments:
Post a Comment