Online Businesses Vulnerable During Social Media Outage

Three of the world’s biggest applications, Instagram, Whatsapp and Facebook were down for the most part of the day. But the outages reveal that during the COVID19 pandemic era, many businesses have moved online, some now solely reliant on their social media traffic. So has this latest blackout exposed a grim reality of how fragile and unpredictable these platforms really are? We take you back to an interview we did in August with founder of Naturally Belizean, Shatefa Garbutt. Her business is solely online, but she may have dodged today’s inconvenience by creating a website.

Shateffa Garbutt

Shateffa Garbutt, Naturally Belizean

“Before COVID, I use to operate solely on Facebook and Instagram. And, during COVID I realized that a lot of people are home, a lot of people are on their devices and stuff like that. They can’t go anywhere. So, that is when I decided to start my own website. I went from only Instagram and Facebook to NaturallyBelizean.com. So, I always try to push customers to jump on the site, you know, get a feel for it, and get use to it, the ecommerce world. Because, we are already use to just DM-ing a business on Instagram to get this product. And, it is so much easier to just go on the site, find the size, place your order and the order will get shipped to you.”