Businesses that heavily rely on social media platforms for advertising and client communication were left scrambling on Tuesday during the Meta platforms outage. Cheyenne Smith, founder of Dakota Ridge, an e-commerce company selling children's shoes, expressed the impact of the outage on her sales, noting that when the site went down, sales to her e-commerce site completely stopped. Despite this setback, she emphasized that she has no plans to end her reliance on Meta's platforms as they drive more sales than other social media sites she has tried.

Small business consultant Ramon Ray highlighted the importance of not being solely dependent on one platform and advised business owners to use outages as an opportunity to collect customer email addresses for alternative communication channels. Laura Levitan, owner of Mod L Photography, shared her experience of losing valuable time and progress during the outage, but was able to rely on her email list and website to communicate with clients. She emphasized the importance of building up offsite communications to reduce dependency on social media platforms.

David Lewis, CEO of HR firm Operations, Inc., acknowledged that as businesses become increasingly reliant on the internet, outages are a reality that small businesses must be prepared for. He encouraged businesses to have contingency plans in place, such as email databases, to ensure communication and marketing efforts are not completely disrupted during outages. Overall, the Meta platforms outage served as a wakeup call for many businesses to diversify their communication channels and be prepared for unexpected disruptions in the future.