What Can We Learn from the Facebook Outage?

We’re sure you noticed that Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and Whatsapp all suffered an outtage this week. This outtage lasted six hours and was Facebook’s biggest ever outage since 2019 – when the social media giant was down for a full 24 hours.

With billions of people and businesses around the world affected by this outage, we wanted to take a look at why this happened and what we can learn from it.

What Caused The Outage?

Shortly before 5pm on Monday, users started to notice that the Facebook apps stopped responding. It wasn’t until just before midnight that all services were back up and running again. This caused a real headache for many people and businesses around the world who heavily depend on Facebook and its apps to conduct their work. This also meant that smaller businesses and creatives were hit financially during the outage.

However, as further details emerged it seems that even Facebook’s internal communications were affected by the outage.

In a statement, Facebook apologised to its users and explained that the outage was caused by a network configuration issue.

Was Any Data Compromised?

There haven’t been any reports about any data breaches during the outage.

What Can we Learn From The Outage?

The first thing we should mention is that outages happen unexpectedly and usually at the worst possible time. So, it’s important to remember that our technological infrustrcture can be fragile. We rely heavily on our IT operations teams to prevent these issues from arising but as with all things, this can only go so far.

It also serves as a reminder that since we have all integrated digital media into both our personal and professional lives that we are still putting ourselves at risk of being unable to carry out our business transactions all at the hands of an outage. Despite this being an uncommon occurence it is something that can never fully be ruled out. To ensure your returning customers and potential clients are able to access your services and products online, we would recommend buliding a robust website as the core of your business, before using social media to drive customers there.

With this approach, you can have peace of mind that all your eggs aren’t in one basket.. especially if a ‘basket’ is down for a whole evening!

To find out more about how a new website could help your business offering be more secure, contact us today.