What did you learn from today’s Facebook outage?

Today, October 5th, 2021 was another important date for digital marketers, and to all those business owners who rely solely on Facebook and Instagram as their channel to market (let alone those who use Facebook to login into their apps and other online services).

Why? Because Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, had a significant worldwide outage, not just for a few minutes, but for hours.

Facebook issued a statement confirming that the cause of the outage was a configuration change to the routers that coordinate network traffic between the company’s data centers. This has a cascading effect, which brought all Facebook services to a grinding halt.

Not only was Facebook gone, but everything Facebook runs disappeared too.

The Lessons you should learn from this Facebook outage (and a good digital marketer should know anyway) are:

• NEVER put all your eggs in one basket
• DO NOT rely on Facebook login on other websites
• DO NOT panic, your life will go on, and you can always look to Google first for information and updates on what is happening.
• CREATE alternative ways for communication with your customers and suppliers
• ALWAYS create a backup of your services, communications, websites etc. If this can happen to Facebook, it can happen to any online service, as well.

And while your business may have taken a hit today if you rely on these platforms as your main sales channel it could be worse.

The outage, along with the whistleblower story which came out over the weekend, prompted Facebook’s share price to drop by over 4%.

According to Bloomberg, this meant that founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth dropped by US$6bn.  See what I mean, it could definitely be worse.