Social media outages hurt small businesses -- so it's important to have a backup plan

The Meta outage that affected Facebook, Messenger and Instagram for a few hours on Tuesday was an inconvenience for most. But businesses that rely on the platforms for advertising, client communication or direct sales lost out more. Experts say that whenever there’s an outage — be it social media or other software we’ve come to rely on — it’s a reminder that small businesses need to make sure they aren’t reliant on one platform and have a contingency plan in place and be able to roll with the punches when an outage does occur.