Facebook is down, what am I going to do?

This is a question many people probably don’t want to ask themselves for different reasons but in this article, we’re speaking strictly from a business owner or creator’s perspective who only relies on social media as a customer service tool. The reason this subject is of personal interest is that we come across countless brands or business’s doing well but not realizing the success of their business completely relies on the strength of Facebook servers. It’s not something that immediately comes to their mind but when the premise is broken down and Facebook literally breaks down, it becomes a much clearer reality.

So, to answer the question as to what are you going to do, well from our experience you’ll go through what I’d like to coin the 3 stages of the “Social Media Servers Crisis Meltdown” (SMSCM). The stages are as follows below.

Panic
Anxiety
Anger / Hate

1. Panic

The 1st stage is panic, you’re thinking wait did I just get hacked? Maybe you’re trying your password and it’s not letting you or the servers are completely down and the Facebook website nor the App aren’t loading. You hop on Instagram and realize, ok I’m not the only one, great. So your panic begins to subside just a bit but not for too long, we’re going to stage 2.

2. Anxiety

It’s been over an hour of you trying to reload the Facebook app or website every 10 minutes just anxiously waiting for it to come back up. A few thoughts are circling your mind if they haven’t already.

People cant message me
I’m losing money
How much longer is this going to be

You’re starting to realize just what you’ve done ie: put the success of your business in the hands of a popular internet company and now your feeling screwed.

3. Anger / Hate

This is when your frustration hits an all-time high, you’re outraged and want blood. How can this thing be down for so long, this is terrible service, etc, etc, you’re vowing to yourself I’m going to use Facebook anymore, but do you have a choice? You are already all in.

Moving Forward

From our perspective businesses and brands completely relying on external platforms for their success are putting themselves in danger down the road and should be prepared for downfalls in big ways. The most recent example of this is the October 4th, 2021 Facebook outage to all its platforms (Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Mapillary, and Oculus) for 6 to 7 hours in some markets. “The outage was caused by the loss of IP routes to the Facebook Domain Name System (DNS) servers, which were all self-hosted at the time.”

In a Mashable article (Mashable is an international entertainment, culture, tech, science and social good digital media platform, news website and multi-platform media and entertainment company) about the effect of the Facebook outage on small businesses, a seller of bamboo socks spoke of how he saw his daily sales fall to one-fourth of his normal and that he feels uneasy going forward with the platform considering 100% of his ad budget goes there. Mashable does a great job in that article really breaking down the impacts, you should give it a read.

This is why having your own personal platform is probably one of the most important aspects of having your own business, especially in this digital age. It’s not to say neglect these platforms because the reach and audience are like no other on the big 3 Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube but we must remember they are run by normal everyday people like me and you, and mistakes or accidents will happen this is inevitable. Even with your own platform, you can fall victim to these issues but you save yourself from putting your eggs all in one basket. If your choice is one basket, you’d better be careful skipping to the market.

Are you an avid Facebook user? Could be for business or just daily personal use. How rough were those 7 hours of not being able to log on? If you are a business owner or have a brand that heavily relies on Facebook did it make you think of creating your own website?