It has been said that when Facebook had the 6 hours outage in October, it cost a whopping $79 million in marketing revenue. The social media giant owns popular social media platforms like Facebook, Messenger, Instagram & WhatsApp, who suffered as a result of the outage of their servers.
While billions of users across the platforms, found themselves bored and unable to connect with friends and loved ones, it also meant that marketers could not send out, or manage their advertising efforts.
Social media marketing is increasingly becoming the go-to marketing solution for companies of all sizes. It allows for a more affordable advertising solution, with a more targeted audience reach. Businesses rely on the social media giant and other platforms to advertise their brands. The outage meant that companies in the social media marketing industry suffered a setback too. Part of social media marketing\ digital marketing companies task is to drive traffic towards the digital presence of companies. The outage meant that for a few hours, they were unable to deliver on this. Not only were users kicked out of the networks but so were the Facebook employees.
Zuckerberg’s apology to his 3 billion + users, assured them that the outage was not due to any hacking of any sort but rather an error with their routine maintenance. As stated by BBC, The billionaire himself is said to have lost $6 billion (£4.4 billion).
Yet another excuse for social media users to run to alternative platforms such as Telegram, it may seem that the outage could have a longer lasting effect. It has been just over a month since the outage and Facebook has stated that they are working on solutions to make their platform more buoyant.