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Hello, everyone. Welcome to the five minutes Podcast. Today the world was taken by surprise. During six hours, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp stopped working; the best analogy to explain this massive outage was written by the Atlantic Daily, when they said: “it's like several of the world's largest countries, disappear at lightning speed,” suddenly more than a billion people would lose their connections.
And of course, you may think, oh, but what is the drama of that? Despite people stopping to post their photos and connecting to their friends today, this kind of digital platform is far more than simple social media. Just to give you some numbers, around 175,000 restaurants rely on platforms using WhatsApp and Facebook. So they were basically enabled to operate for pretty much the whole operating day.
Facebook stocks drop it 5%. The founder and CEO of Facebook lost around 6 billion US dollars in one trading day. And why this? It's because technology, as I said recently, in a podcast talking about IT projects, is riskier than you think. And today, we saw an absolutely perfect example. Most of the work today relies on technology.
And when technology fails this way, it disrupts all the valley chain. Several small businesses just did not have any revenue. Imagine the amount of products that were not sold on Instagram today. Imagine the amount of people that were enabled to connect because Whatsapp, I would say by far the biggest phone company, if I can call the phone company, just disappear. Imagine that your phone is on mute for a whole day, and you cannot work. You cannot communicate. You cannot send messages quickly to American users. Maybe Whatsapp is not as popular, but for example, in Europe, where I live in Brazil, it's dramatic it shut down everything. So I use this kind of tool every minute. And for example, today, it was the main disruption for me because I said, oh, I need to send this message. And these, and look, I'm so tiny. Imagine all the value chain of teams of agile teams working together, all of these relying on this kind of platform that is not working today, Businesses, E-commerces all disrupted by this.
And why I'm saying this is what we can learn is that, of course, I'm not saying that we should not use technology because it's the opposite we need to use, and we need to be savvy on using that because technology is a key for our success, but do we have options? Are we putting all of our technology relying on one provider or relying on one basket? Because imagine the business today that relies on the restaurant or the small business that relies a hundred percent on Facebook; it will be a challenge, right? It means today you didn't have any revenue.
So, and it's not just a matter of apologizing, but then it's a massive disruption in your business. So how you can do that, you need to diversify more. You need to think about using different platforms you need about splitting. Instead of using these for 100%, you are dividing two or three in the same article from the Atlantic. She said, one incredible thing is that today everybody is rethinking how they approach technology because today Facebook received this, But maybe tomorrow it's a digital bank, and imagine your deposit disappear.
And after tomorrow it may be an airline. And this is part of the new track today. It's a new normal, and how do we survive? We need to prepare ourselves for these kinds of risks and volatility. And we prepare ourselves by raising and finding options that will slow down your business, but it will not stop our business. So there is what you should learn from that because these kinds of disruptions will be more and more part of our daily routine.
As we rely more on technology, we will extract absolutely all the benefits of it, but we'll face whole new challenges regarding speed regarding virtual work regarding virtual collaboration, imagine a massive video conferencing software stopping working, or a cloud service stopping working, where all the files off your companies are in, and you just stop operations. So think always in these, of course, I'm not even thinking about criminals, act like a hacker.
And this imagine that this is just a failure. That is part of life, but when entities become so big, even small failure, when you have these massive impacts becomes an absolutely massive disruption that we see. So let's learn from that. Let's think more about how we can increase options. Imagine if your schedule or everything that you are doing in your project is on a platform like this one. And today, you did an operation, and imagine how much it will cost for you to lose one day in a capital-intensive project. Sometimes it's just a disaster.
Think about that, and see you next week with another five Minutes Podcast.
