The freightmare before Christmas

Facebook has fallen … for a few hours — Twitter users couldn’t wait to dunk on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp when their platforms went dark after a system update went awry. Facebook’s engineering team’s explanation: “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication.” Aside from saving families and friends from each other’s scorn on the platform, what kind of impact did the outage have on retail? ShipHero founder and CEO Aaron Rubin tweeted that Facebook-driven non-Amazon e-commerce sales fell 27% on average. As hated as Facebook may be, it is apparent just how vital it has become to SMBs.

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