LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — By early Monday evening, Facebook was back online after an outage that also took down Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger for most of the day.
A Las Vegas bakery was placed in a difficult situation by the outage. Frosted Bakery in North Las Vegas says it gets 100% of its business from social media.
When Instagram or Facebook is down, the bakery's owner Cindy Trussel says, they make nearly nothing in sales as they can’t advertise their pastries.
“We rely on social media to help move all of that, so from a nonprofit stance it is going to affect us hugely,” Trussel said.
Monday morning, staff tried to open their Facebook and Instagram accounts to check for customers’ requests, but a notification that said “Service Error” was all that popped up. It was at this moment that Trussel was concerned about what would happen to her business.
“It’s going to affect events coming up this week for customers, they won’t be able to reach us unless they call us and that is not always effective,” Trussel explained.
She realized her business would start off the week making close to nothing in sales, which was something she couldn’t afford especially after this difficult year.
“A lot of customers that call us will get our information from social media platforms and so if we can’t reach them there is really no other way for them to contact us and so it's going to affect our sales and whatever we do this week if that doesn’t come up soon,” said Trussel.
During the duration of time that these social media pages were down, it was not only impacting Trussel's bakery but also her nonprofit, Lighthouse Charities, an organization that is set up to help refugees establish themselves in our city once they arrive. 100% of the bakery’s profits go to the operations of her nonprofit.
“They rely on opportunities like this to be able to pay their bills and literally be able to put food on the table to their family and so if they are not able to come to a place of employment that can afford to employ them that is going impact their family and everything they are trying to do,” said Trussel.
For some this outage meant they would miss out on the latest updates from friends and family, but for others, it was their entire business on the line.
“That is how we reach our customers, in fact, we will post something that morning and then on most days sell out before we close based on what we post each day,” explained Trussel.
