MOSCOW, October 5. /TASS/. Turnover of Russian online stores during the global outage of Facebook on Monday decreased in Russia by 5%, and the number of transactions decreased by 14% compared to the usual period, a representative of the CloudPayments online payment service told TASS on Tuesday.

"According to CloudPayments analysts, during the global outage on October 4 from 7:00 pm to 00:00, online turnover sank by only 5% compared to the corresponding period on October 3, while the number of transactions decreased by 14%," the service’s representative said.

The decline was most noticeable in the following industries: clothing and footwear (turnover fell by 56%, transactions - by 41%), food delivery (down 17% and 14% respectively), jewelry and accessories (down 46% and 53%), charity (down 12% and 3%), educational services (down 10% and 38%, respectively). These are the industries where goods are often sold via social networks and instant messengers, so the outage caused a decline in sales, the analysts said.

"Interestingly, in the same period, the demand in the Dating category increased by 23% (the number of transactions went up by 28%), the online turnover of paid medical services soared by 67% (transactions increased by 12%), and in the Pharmacies category the online turnover skyrocketed by 92%," CloudPayments noted.

Talking to TASS, President of the Association of Internet Trade Companies (AITC) Artem Sokolov confirmed that massive disruption in social networks and messengers "affected the work of small online stores that conduct their business, for example, via Facebook or Instagram."

"As for the largest online retailers, the failure affected only those whose client service is configured, in particular via WhatsApp. Basically, medium and large players attract a client to their own independent applications, thereby ensuring their work as usual," he noted.

On Monday, according to data from Downdetector, a service that monitors the activities of popular Internet websites, users reported a massive disruption in the activities of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Given the outage and disruption, the shares of large IT companies plunged. According to American experts Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, and Brian Krebs, a well-known journalist in cybersecurity, the disruption of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp was caused by the fact that on the morning of October 4, EST, someone inside Facebook updated routing protocols that allow browsers to find the addresses of these social networks. The global outage lasted more than 6.5 hours.