Jason Wong picked the wrong day to restock his false eyelash line. Yesterday, in the midst of a nearly day-long Instagram and Facebook outage, Wong and his company, Wonghaus Ventures, planned to run a Facebook and Instagram ad campaign to promote the restock, and to have influencers post sponsored content about it. The posts went up, but few people saw them. Wong estimates the outage cost his company around $10,000 in revenue. “Looking at our prior revenue for the past seven or eight days, and looking at what happened today, we can kind of estimate how much money we lost based on our past week’s history,” he says. Wong isn’t the only one who lost money from the outage. Millions of companies advertise on the platform or rely on sponsored posts to do the marketing for them. When it goes down, they lose valuable communication lines to the public. Instagram and Facebook are economies unto themselves where people can see advertisements and buy directly from them. The outage is as if billboards and radio ads disappeared from a city, and no one could find the stores where the advertised products are anyway. Read more at The Verge.
