Instagram's Outage Put Small Businesses at Risk | Time

Audrey Leighton Rogers was relieved that she launched her fall collection last week, and not on Monday. Rogers, a Barcelona-based clothing designer and vintage curator, gets 95% of the traffic to her site from Instagram. These days, her income is, she says, 100% dependent on the audience she has built over a decade on the app. And on Monday, when Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp experienced a global outage lasting nearly six hours, that audience disappeared. “That really puts you in a vulnerable position when you realize you’re so reliant on one social media,” she said the next night over the phone. “I was like, Wow, if this had happened like a week before, this really could have messed up a whole month of work. That’s scary.” Instagram and Facebook are home to countless small businesses, whose owners, like Rogers, depend on it for their income. The Monday outage could have been catastrophic for any of them, not just because of the loss of traffic, but because they don’t have access to their customers outside of the apps. Now, they’re faced with the knowledge that something as esoteric as a router configuration update—entirely out of their control—can derail their livelihoods. Perhaps…
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