BRATISLAVA, Oct 4th 2021
The three popular social media services Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram are currently experiencing an outage affecting millions of users worldwide.
Not only the mobile apps are being unavailable but also their respective websites, leaving Twitter as the only communication channel for the company to let their users know they are aware of the issue:
(previous tweet left for comparison purposes and it is unrelated to this article)
Trying to visit www.whatsapp.com or www.facebook.com return with no service whatsoever and Instagram is now returning an error:
Even though social media apps shouldn’t be considered mission critical services, many small businesses depend on their availability in order to reach their customers. As these services are provided without charging their users but being paid by advertisers, there is not much users can do about it. Advertisers as paying customers might have a set of terms and conditions including service availability, but that’s unclear at the moment.
Whatsapp for Business allows mainly small business to promote their services, publish their opening hours and sell products.
Facebook and Instagram also have their business versions where large and small companies publish content alike and use them as marketing tools for their products and campaigns.
Instagram is also used by content creators either as their main platform or a second platform in parallel to others, such as YouTube.