Why Facebook Went Down and What You Can Learn From It

Posted 07.10.2021

By Steven Titchener

Everything went dark. Chaos ensued.

At least it did for Facebook this week. Here’s the big story and the even bigger takeaway.

 

15:00 – Facebook goes dark

There I was, cruising Instagram to learn the latest web and marketing tips (shameless plug already – go follow us), then suddenly. It stops, no pages are loading, no content to see, why won’t my story post?

I try messaging a friend to see if theirs is working. No reply. 

Whats app. No reply.

Am I going to have to… ring somebody? No, we can’t think that way, it must just be my internet connection.

So I go to the place that I barely use anymore. Facebook. That’s down too!

 

17:00 – Panic!

What am I going to do? I’m going to have to socialise! 

What if it never comes back? I’ve spent so much time creating content for Instagram, building up a following and a community there. All that time is going to go down the drain!

We all know how much time you have to spend on Instagram to actually grow on there and how long it takes to make great content. And how am I going to get in touch with all of those people that I’ve been engaging with? I don’t have their numbers or email addresses, we just chat through DMs.

Maybe we could talk through LinkedIn… but a lot of them don’t use it or haven’t put time into other platforms, they just focussed on the one that everyone does. They thought that was the best idea.

 

18:00 – The realisation

Wait a minute. This is fine. 

All this time I’ve been working on Instagram, I’ve also been working on my website, my blog, my email and SMS list. It’s not the end of the world!

I can still reach most of my community, the ones that really engaged with what I did because they went off Instagram to read my blogs and join my email list.

I didn’t even like Instagram anyway.

 

23:30 – Back online

Wow, someone messed up! 

Check this out as it will explain it much better than I can:

@rey.nbowsthe whistleblower thing is also true + important, but not what caused this incident! ##facebook ##facebookoutage ##fyp ##socialmedia ##news ##geek ##tech♬ Monkeys Spinning Monkeys – Kevin MacLeod

 

23:30 – Yay Instagram!

Phew, I love Instagram. So glad it’s back up!

 

Takeaway

While it might be a fun story and somewhat based on true events of my life, what we need to remember is that you shouldn’t build a business on one platform. It could go down at any time, it could remove data that you had built up, it could even get banned.

Remember a few years ago there was talk of TikTok being banned, which was an insane idea and would never have happened, but you just don’t know.

What you need to do is build up your stack of OWNED media. This is things like email lists that you can keep backs up of, your website that you can move to a different server if one goes down and personal connections.

All of these things can’t get taken away from you, you own them. Social media platforms could go down, they could fail, you never know.

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