Good morning! Today, Brazilian small businesses left in the dark during WhatsApp blackout. Evergrande’s impact on Brazilian miners will be reduced — but long-term trends should worry exporters. New railway legislation one step closer to approval.
WhatsApp blackout delivers huge blow to Brazil’s small companies
Facebook-owned apps — including Instagram and WhatsApp Messenger — were out of action for over six hours on Monday, before slowly flickering back to life. “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication,” Facebook said in a statement.
- The worldwide impact was severe and far-reaching. In Brazil, WhatsApp is the country’s single biggest communication tool — and it was down for an entire afternoon.
- The messaging service is on 99 percent of Brazilian cell phones, and 93 percent of them log into WhatsApp daily.
Why it matters. According to think tank Fundação Getulio Vargas and small business support organization Sebrae, 70 percent of Brazil’s small companies rely on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram as their marketplaces.
- Back in June, WhatsApp announced it was home to 5 million business accounts in Brazil, which interacted with over 175 million...