Facebook outage highlights global over-reliance on its services

Shutdown heavily impacts ability to communicate and do business for many of platform's 2.8 billion users

From bereft Brazilians to relaxed Russians and internet-savvy Indians, Facebook's outage highlighted the dependence much of the world has developed on its social media products, and put the spotlight on its global power.

The fallout of Facebook's unprecedented almost six-hour outage has mostly focused on the financial impact to the $1tn social media empire: $50bn (37bn) was wiped off the company's market value by jittery investors, founder Mark Zuckerberg's paper fortune shrunk by $7bn and more than $13m of the advertising dollars that are its lifeblood disappeared each hour the platform was offline.