Small businesses HUGELY affected by WhatsApp's worldwide outage

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New Delhi: The widely used messaging service WhatsApp, experienced an hour-long outage on Tuesday, leaving small businesses that depend on the network more and more in the dark. Industry analysts predict that as more small businesses rely on platforms to market their products, such situations may become more typical.

The newest outage to affect popular international platforms like Facebook, Google, and content delivery network (CDN) provider Cloudflare is the one affecting WhatsApp. A spokeswoman for the Meta firm said, "The brief downtime was the result of a technical fault on our part and has now been fixed. ()

Users who were relying on the platform more and more for their businesses came under fire. Pooja Kaur, a baker from Kolkata, had to personally call users to obtain client locations in order to fulfil orders. Sanjay Das, senior claims manager of Max Life Insurance in Mumbai, pointed out that the interruption had a more significant effect, delaying or even cancelling the day's work programme. ()

Das cited the need for internal reporting and client meetings about significant policy coverage as the reasons for the reliance on the messaging app. Nearly a third of WhatsApp's business users are headquartered in India, where there are over 450 million active users. Because of this, its outages matter.

Despite the fact that outages among major internet businesses are not frequent, a senior executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he works for a rival service claimed that sporadic disruptions are unavoidable.

"The nature of technology is such that there will be downtimes that damage consumers and services even when you have redundancies in place, which all large IT businesses do," he said.

On Tuesday, after being down for more than an hour, WhatsApp was back online, but customers reported they couldn't send or receive messages. According to Down Detector, a website that monitors online outages throughout the world, the report initially appeared at 12:30 pm, and by 1 pm, there had been over 30,000 reports.