£20m lost by UK retailers thanks to Internet Giants in just an hour!

Today saw the internet crash, and with it, UK retailers have lost an estimated £20m in revenue thanks to an overreliance on the internet giants providing the majority of platforms for many small businesses and UK retailers across the internet.

ACCORDING TO ONS DATA, the UK’s reliance on e-commerce, more so during the last year, accounted for around 30% of all retail sales in April 2021 alone. With the internet giants disrupting the world for just an hour, it will have resulted in approximately £20m of lost retail sales for UK business.

Fastly CDN had a major outage today affecting major online websites such as Shopify, Spotify, Stripe, Gov UK and BBC among others. This is what happens when half of the internet relies on goliaths like Amazon, Google and Fastly for all of its servers and web services. The entire internet has become dangerously geared on one player.

The world has adapted exponentially during the last year towards online activity, escalated by the pandemic and the inability to explore our high streets and local businesses. Over 80,000 small businesses rely on Shopify as a platform for their online sales in the UK alone and over 3.5 million sites worldwide. It further highlights the overreliance we have as a country on these Internet Giants. This just goes to show just how much our economic impact relies on them when things go wrong.