Much of the news around the six-hour Facebook outage this week has focused on the social media and communications side. However, with Facebook also operating as a techfin, what do mass global outages mean for the users relying on their payment services?
For a brief summary that explains Facebook’s outage, check out this article from The Guardian
Facebook Pay (either via Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp) is currently live in about 40 countries across the world. It has grown in users every month for the last 4 years. The pandemic has accelerated this dramatically, with some estimating 19% monthly user growth in the US market through the first few months of lockdown in 2020.
Perhaps one of the most impacted areas with Facebook’s outage is the small business sector that relies on social media and the commerce platforms provided by the likes of Facebook and Instagram to reach customers, process orders, and take payments. Outages that repeatedly and unexpectedly take many small businesses offline for over a day can have huge impacts. After all, it’s only been 10 months since Facebook’s last crash.
Banks are subject to rigorous stress tests and are often fined for IT outages by local authorities, but it appears Facebook and other big tech behemoths are not yet subject to the same consequences, leaving consumers and merchants unable to make or take payments for hours at a time.
As more and more companies move in to take a slice of the payments pie, banks may have the upper hand over techfins for their robust measures – but for how much longer?
Pollinate works with banks to make better use of the wealth of data they own and transform their merchant acquiring solutions for business banking customers.
