Original article by David Swan
The Australian – Page: 13 & 17 : 6-Oct-21

Marcus Thompson says Facebook’s global outage highlights the fact that Australian businesses rely too much on the social media giant and many lack an alternative platform to engage with customers. Thompson, the former head of information warfare at the Australian Defence Force, says local companies need to become more self-sufficient and less dependent on offshore-based digital platforms. Localsearch co-founder Daniel Stoten says small businesses must have a presence on all social media sites that are used by their customers, rather than being reliant on one platform. The Facebook outage lasted for nearly six hours, and has been attributed to a faulty configuration change; it also affected WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, and had to be announced on rival platform Twitter.

CORPORATES
FACEBOOK INCORPORATED, WHATSAPP INCORPORATED, INSTAGRAM LLC, FACEBOOK MESSENGER, TWITTER INCORPORATED, LOCALSEARCH