African business owners who depend on social media to drive their sales are counting losses incurred during a six-hour outage of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram.

Experts say that e-commerce services, which have registered tremendous growth on the continent during the pandemic were the most affected.

“Those who received the biggest hit are freelancers and owners of small stores, unlike big stores which have websites,” Digital marketing expert Karen Wambugu told the BBC.

She added: “When social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are not working, small stores cannot process their sales because they don’t have alternatives.”

A businesswoman in Ghana who runs an online and in-person restaurant in the capital Accra said her the outage happened at busy lunch time hours.

“80% of our orders come from online customers. Only a few customers who could drive during the heavy traffic could come to the restaurant” Kafui Adza told the BBC.

In Nairobi an online home interior business said the outage occurred at a time when business would be at its peak on a regular day.

“Our estimation is that we did not attend to about 50 clients, and today (Tuesday) business is really down,” Richard Gikonyo said.

Internet monitoring firm Netblocks estimates that the outage could have cost the Sub-Saharan Africa economy about $19.8m (£14.5m).