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It is extremely important and very popular with small businesses, microbusinesses and actually users of it in communication across the world. So my area of focus is on small business and microbusinesses. I didn't have my store.ĬORNISH: Just for a little bit of context, just how popular is WhatsApp, for example, as a tool for conducting business? And which parts of the world do you see it having kind of a central role?ĮL TARABISHY: Absolutely. What I heard is, well, I didn't make any money today because everything was down. When everything went down and you're talking to a different team members across - right? - everybody was confused as where everything was, basically.ĬORNISH: Did you hear from anyone who said, I lost a lot of money yesterday because X, or a lot of business?ĮL TARABISHY: Yeah. I'm going to this delivery first, then this delivery and this delivery. The other example, when it came to deliveries of orders and stuff like that, where people are saying, I'm coming. So imagine when it went down for the four or five hours or six hours it was down, everybody that was using WhatsApp to make their reservations, to confirm the reservation for people to come - right? - the whole system went down. In Panama, and they have rolled out this campaign where health providers can - using WhatsApp - can come to your house to do COVID testing. Nobody knew it was down.ĬORNISH: Can you give me two small stories that you've heard from business owners or people who really rely on these programs of what happened to them because of the outage?ĮL TARABISHY: Yes. And we just didn't know if it was the internet connection or the Wi-Fi. Well, what I didn't hear - let's start with that - because when it went down, nobody knew it was down. When the outage happened, what did you hear from some of your contacts around the world? Do you have an example?ĮL TARABISHY: Yes. Nice to be here.ĬORNISH: I'm not sure people totally appreciate just the parts of the world where WhatsApp in particular or Instagram are a part of the way people actually do business on a local level. He's a professor at George Washington School of Business and heads the International Council for Small Businesses.ĪYMAN EL TARABISHY: Thank you. We spoke about what happened with Ayman El Tarabishy. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Non-English language spoken).ĬORNISH: He assured people that government services would remain available through other channels - Twitter, email, YouTube - and that the outage would eventually come to an end, which it did about six hours later.

For example, they have to drop their pin to their location on WhatsApp numbers, but we were not getting all this information.ĬORNISH: In Tanzania, the spokesperson for the government took to another social media app, Twitter, to urge people to be patient.

We couldn't even do our deliveries because most of our deliveries, we rely on the information they sent to WhatsApp.

LYDIA MUTUNE OSEWE: They couldn't place their orders. And she says clients couldn't reach them. Lydia Mutune Osewe owns a plant shop in Nairobi, Kenya, and it's entirely on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. When WhatsApp and other apps owned by Facebook went down earlier this week, tens of millions of people worldwide struggled to communicate and many to run their businesses.