Social Media influencers rue Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram outage

Dubai: Last night’s social media outage caused a havoc in people’s lives. It brought to light the dependency on social media, whether it be for sourcing news and information, sharing updates, or simply connecting with the world. Among the most affected segments of society were social media influencers as their bread and butter depends on the social media. So how did they cope?

Indian expat Niki Shah, a social media influencer, said it was very hard for her to accept three major social media platforms being down. “In a technologically advanced world that we are currently living in, it was very hard to accept that not one, but three such big platforms WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook were not working for so many hours.”

Turkish expat Safak Kural, 35, a multi-award winning lifestyle influencer, said WhatsApp and Instagram crashing left him feeling very low.

"I felt so disconnected from the world without access to my WhatsApp.”

Russian influencer and entrepreuner in Dubai, Antonia Valentine, 34, said: “My life is connected to digital in a big way. From a business perspective, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook are my main tools of communication. When these three platforms crashed, I was inundated with many phone calls.”

She added: “What I personally learnt from this incident is that you always have to keep all contacts, contracts and media backed up independently on a hard drive.”

It is the same for Pakistani influencer, Anna Khan, 35, who said the social media outage affected her badly. “Yesterday one of my promotional reels was supposed to go up for a clothing brand which was recently launched in Dubai. They handpicked a few influencers to model their products and promote the brand. We were working on this project for a long time.”

She said she was at a live event to promote this brand when the outage happened. “Besides the live event not getting off to the start we would have expected it to be, I lost many views on my posts owing to the outage.”

Rutavi Mehta, 32, influencer and entrepreneur, also said she felt handicapped with the social medial outage. “When WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram crashed, it was hard for me. I had to finish my social media paid content for some brands. I was not able to meet my deadline as a result.”

Mehta said she also felt disconnected from family as they regularly chat on WhatsApp.