ON Monday, October 4th, the Facebook conglomerate went offline just before noon Eastern time. The group owned by Facebook, including WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and many other applications, went offline for over 7 hours, leaving around 6 billion users stranded digitally. It was a minor pain in the neck for some but for others, it was a significant economic blow.

What potentially caused the outage?

All indications are that there was a significant failure in the domain name service (DNS) at Facebook coupled with removing all Facebook network information from the Internet routing tables. What does all this mean?

DNS is the Internet’s phone book, and it is the system that translates the cryptic numerical addresses assigned to every device on the Internet into discernible words like www.jamaicaobserver.com or www.facebook.com. You are lost on the Internet without directions when this happens. Coupled with the loss of the maps, aka routing tables, Facebook and all its organs fell into an Internet black hole.

How were users affected?

Initially, everyone thought their mobile devices had a problem. Thousands restarted their devices but had no luck; WhatsApp was inoperable for millions of users globally. Further investigation revealed that Facebook was also offline, and billions of users worldwide lost access to its platforms. Millions use Facebook apps as their primary communication channel to friends and family. They also use Facebook as their portal or gateway to thousands of other products or services they use daily, so this outage was far-reaching. The seemingly insatiable need for the “always on, always communing” users to always connect caused them to quickly look to other instant-messaging apps like Signal, Telegram and Apple’s iMessage to keep their communications going. For many businesses, it was a different scramble.

What does this mean for business?

Facebook makes approximately US$13.3 million per hour based on its recent quarterly revenue. Depending on how you do the math, factoring peak and off-peak times, they lost anywhere between $US60-100 million for the outage period. For them, it might be a mere blip. Still, for the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) globally, it’s a much different story as these businesses use many Facebook apps for some vital part of their organisational operating processes. Facebook staff also experienced issues attempting to use their internal apps and also to enter their buildings.

One construction business owner explained to us that they have WhatsApp groups set up for their current projects. It is an essential communication tool to keep the material flow and reduce bottlenecks within their operations. For many MSMEs, these Facebook apps are the only way their customers communicate with them, meaning that they have no website — Facebook and Instagram are their storefronts! That means zero sales for the period on top of the current pandemic issues that cause heartburn for business users. This outage has caused many to realise that they are building an empire on someone else’s land.

MSMEs, please ensure that you have your website (your land) and a backup communication plan for your customers and team. Remember, we can still pick up the phone and call people!

Christopher Reckord is CEO of managed IT services provider tTech Limited. Trevor Forrest is founder and CEO of 876 Technology Solutions. Collectively, they have approximately 80 years of experience helping organisations of varying sizes procure and implement information technology solutions and transform digitally.