How dependent are Indian businesses on Facebook and WhatsApp?

Social media services Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were recently hit by an outage that lasted almost six hours.

Given that it was night in India at the time of the outage, it may not have had as much impact here as in other places. But it should make businesses and policymakers consider how essential companies like Facebook and Google are to the economy.

Businesses, especially, should consider the risks involved, since so many of them depend heavily on just two or three such platforms.

Let’s look at some numbers involved just with Facebook’s family of services.

According to PIB and the Ministry of Electronics and IT, India had 410 million Facebook users, 530 million WhatsApp users, and 210 million Instagram users as of February this year.