MONROVIA, LIBERIA – African business owners who depend on social media to drive their sales are counting losses incurred during a six-hour outage of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instangram

Experts say that e-commerce services, which have registered tremendous growth on the continent during the pandemic, were the most affected.

A Digital Marketing Expert Karen Wambugu told the BBC, those who received the biggest hit are freelancers and owners of small stores, unlike big stores which have websites.

She added “When social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are not working, small stores cannot process their sales because they don’t have alternatives.”

A businesswoman in Ghana who runs an online and in-person restaurant in the capital Accra said she lost eighty percent of her orders from online customers.

In Nairobi an online home interior business said the outage occurred at a time when business would be at its peak on a regular day.

Internet monitoring firm Netblocks estimates that the outage could have cost the Sub-Saharan Africa economy about US19.8 Million.