Facebook and its suite of platforms that include Instagram and WhatsApp experienced a worldwide outage on Monday. The crash, which affected billions of users, is now bringing to light new realizations for anyone who use the platforms for marketing or advertising.
The outage happened around 4:00 PM EST, with the sites and apps remaining down for a total of 7 hours. During that time, Facebook apologized and acknowledged the potential impact it was having on its business users — via Twitter.
To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.
— Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021
“To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.”
Meanwhile, the outage of three major social media channels could be a great lesson for both businesses that use one or all of the platforms that crashed.
How Will the Facebook Crash Impact Digital Marketing?
Merav Katz, corporate marketing manager at yellowHEAD, said the incident was eye-opening for both businesses and private users as they suddenly lost access to the three major platforms.
“It was a shake-up for businesses that rely on those platforms for work,” Katz said. “The outage showed why it’s problematic to depend on only a few social networks.”
Since outages like this are extremely rare, she doesn’t expect it to cause businesses to majorly re-evaluate their marketing strategies. She does, however, expect more people to explore platforms like TikTok and Snapchat, noting that social networks not involved in the crash experienced more traffic than usual.
Reasons Behind the Outage
Why was the Facebook network down to begin with? In a blog post on Monday evening, the company said “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
Is Facebook Still Down?
By 11:00 PM, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram were up and running again.
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