Raise your hand if you were affected by the Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram outage…
I hope you had a happy Monday because Facebook’s week wasn’t off to such a great start. They suffered from a global outage that took hours to fix. A much needed social media break.
It’s a reminder and wake-up call about how much time you actually spend on Instagram and WhatsApp and Facebook. Everyone panicked when their messages weren’t delivering and Instagram was displaying the message- “couldn’t refresh feed.” Restarting your phone multiple times, checking your mobile data and making sure your wi-fi is isn’t faulty, only to figure out that everything’s okay at your end – it’s Facebook’s problem.
The impact of the outage was far-reaching and severe. Facebook has established itself as the backbone for online communication, with more than 3 billion people around the world using their apps. They cover a multitude of services from streaming, to messaging to virtual reality and they are constantly expanding.
The impact of the outage is more than you can think of- some of it positive but most of it was not so positive.
First, let’s talk about the impact on the company. The $1 trillion media empire had $50 billion wiped off the company’s market value by jittery investors. Further, founder Mark Zuckerberg’s paper fortune shrunk by $7 billion. Not just that, more than $13 million of the advertising dollars that are its lifeblood were lost each hour that the platform was out. Nearly six hours means almost $78 million! (source: Guardian)
However, billions of users around the world also felt the impact on their businesses and communications. According to Forrester’s research, across a snapshot of countries (including US, India’s main metropolitan cities, Australia, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy) consumers were three to four times more likely to use a Facebook-owned service at least once a week, than Snapchat, Twitter, TikTok or LinkedIn.
Think about just how important Facebook’s apps are for conducting business- small businesses in particular. Reaching out to people through Instagram and communicating with customers through WhatsApp’s business account. In fact, some businesses do not have a digital presence outside Facebook!
The outage hit India during the night time, around 9:15 pm, sparing a country that is heavily dependent on Facebook’s ecosystem for business and communication. With over 300 million active monthly users, India is by many magnitudes the biggest market for the messaging app globally. It’s easy to conduct business on Facebook’s apps since they’re free and come with a relatively low advertisement cost (like promoting posts). In many nations, Facebook provides a platform that makes it an essential shop window for e-commerce sales for tens of millions of businesses.
Sounds dramatic but it truly is an important tool for small businesses.
Let’s look at some numbers:
63.2% of the 1,007 respondents of Privacy HQ’s survey had bought something they saw in a social media ad in the past month. 78.7% of the Gen-Z’s and 56.2% of the Gen-Xers bought something. 72.8% of the people saw the ad for the item they bought on Facebook. followed by 66% on Instagram and 45.9% on YouTube. Clearly, Facebook is leading by a larger margin when it comes to customer reach. The respondents saw an average of four ads every half hour while browsing on social media. Despite that, 72.9% users would rather continue viewing the ads to keep the service free. This implies that ads aren’t such a big annoyance and some people might just like the ads. (source: Privacy HQ)
This outage made them realise their dependence on Facebook’s apps. It helped them understand the need for diversification in advertisement spending. Instead of just focusing on Insta and FB ads, they can spend some money on Google search optimization and Amazon.
Apart from directly affecting the sales of small businesses, certain websites were also affected. Facebook is also used to sign into various other apps and websites (have you ever used the option “login with Facebook?”). This caused a domino effect and people were unable to login to shopping websites or sign into their smart tv and other devices with internet connection.
Influencers, especially in the western world, were unable to work. Their entire livelihood depends on social media, fb and Insta being the biggest. It’s like you show up to work but then you find out you have a holiday today. That’s probably how most of the influencers felt about their day off from social media.
Nearly six hours without talking to your friends is a lot, especially in such a connected world. When Facebook was down, people looked for other apps to chat. Think: Snapchat, Twitter, Signal, Telegram…
Million of new users were added on Signal (and Telegram) in just one day when WhatsApp was down. They welcomed their new users via a tweet:
Of course Twitter users didn’t miss the chance for some amazing meme content. Twitter enjoyed its limelight and embraced its moment in the spotlight. This is evident from their Tweet:
Other companies didn’t refrain from making jokes and acknowledging Twitter’s gain. McDonald’s replied by saying, “how r u handling the fame.” They even asked, “hi what can i get u,” to which Twitter replied “59.6 million nuggets for my friends.”
If you’re looking for a reason to laugh, read the replies to the above tweet :p
Meanwhile, this outage acted as a reminder of just how dependent we are on social media, Facebook’s apps in particular. And a very important lesson, always have backup options!
I’ll leave you with some Twitter memes I think are worth sharing.
The Echo-nomist 
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