How Facebook’s mishap hurt Brazil’s economy

On Monday, October 4th, one of the largest technological enterprises in the world was out of air. The world-renowned Facebook, which owns two other social media platforms, WhatsApp, and Instagram, stopped working, creating a huge obstacle for most businesses, as in a state of pandemic, technological communications are more vital than ever. Having the top two most used social media platforms offline, WhatsApp, and Facebook, respectively, greatly affected the lives of many, especially those who depend upon them for work. This mass outage was the biggest Facebook had faced since 2008 and was caused by configuration change to the servers that didn’t go as planned, thus causing the apps to go offline. This had severe implications with not just Facebook itself but many Brazilian businesses who depend on Facebook’s communication services.

It was reported by Sebrae (a service that aids small businesses) that this outage affected around 70% of Brazil’s small businesses, most of which are attempting to recover following the pandemic. Sebrae’s president, Carlos Melles told the news that micro-businesses depend on social media more than ever, to divulge information and communicate with clients or other businesses to close deals. As mentioned before, this outage also caused problems for Facebook, as their share’s value decreased by 5%. Following the solving of the issue, Facebook sent out a statement apologizing to those affected by the outage, “To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms,” said Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure, in a blogpost on Monday after the incident. 
As every day goes by the world gets closer to getting past the pandemic, though businesses around the world are still dealing with its effects. Brazil was one of the countries that was hurt the most economically during the pandemic, and problems like this outage weigh down businesses attempting to rally from the ashes of all other enterprises who perished during the pandemic. As mentioned before, Facebook hadn’t faced a problem like this in 13 years, therefore it is highly unlikely this repeats itself soon, giving all those weakened businesses an opportunity to repair the damage and return to prosperity. 

​By: Matias Gonçalves
Edited by: Anna Kissajikian