During the six hours Facebook was offline on Monday, small-business owner J.D. Holland frantically printed 250 flyers to post around Burnsville, Mississippi, and considered buying an ad in the town’s two-page local paper to keep business flowing at his farm store and nutrition club.
“They have my life,” said Holland of the social platform and advertising giant. Since the beginning of the pandemic, his company has depended on Facebook Live videos and posts on his business page to drive sales for his nutrition club, he told NBC News. But with no access to the site, his business was completely shut down.
Monday’s outage led to losses of anywhere between $300 and $400 in Facebook-driven sales, Holland said. “I know the pandemic was big, but I responded to this more so like ‘This is a big threat.’ What if it really went down?”
“What if Facebook really went down?”
Holland is one of around three million businesses worldwide that actively advertise on Facebook who were affected by Monday’s shutdown. While Facebook apologized late Monday for the massive outage, saying the problem had been caused by “faulty” configuration changes, the outage has forced many small-business owners to consider what risk they carry in depending so heavily on one platform for their livelihood.
“It really made me get in my thinkers about what I need to do from an advertising perspective in case anything goes down,” Holland said. “Facebook won’t care [we lost sales], but we have so much trust.”
Facebook apologized to the business community in a statement on Monday, and said advertisers were not billed for ads during the outage.
“We understand the impact outages like these have on the millions of businesses that use our services to find and reach customers,” the statement read. “We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient.”
Zahid Buttar, who runs an online vitamin store in Mooresville, North Carolina, told NBC News that he lost between $5,000 and $6,000 in sales during yesterday’s outage. Buttar said he spends about $1,000 a month on Facebook ads for the business. But after Facebook went offline for several hours, he’s considering pulling those ads entirely and using email and text messaging instead.
“What do we do?” he said. “It’s like a bait and switch. It’s like you set the hook in our cheek and we have some semblance of a business and then, boom, it went down.”
Facebook is the country’s second-largest online advertiser, according to eMarketer. Google leads, with roughly 29 percent of the U.S. digital ad market share, with Facebook following with 25 percent and Amazon at about 11 percent, according to the online marketing research firm. In July, Facebook reported a second quarter profit that had soared by 101 percent, to…
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