MANY global users of the Facebook owned social media entities such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger will be happy to know that all services are back online.
The engineering team at Facebook announced on Twitter “To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.”
Yesterday, Facebook and its sibling social platforms Instagram and WhatsApp went down inexplicably. The outage affected billions of users and millions of advertisers. Inside Facebook, the outage also broke nearly all of the internal systems that employees use to communicate and to work.
Facebook hasn’t provided a detailed explanation of the outage, though outside experts are saying it was due to an issue with the networking technology.
Facebook’s VP of Infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, published a corporate blog post saying the outage was the result of a “faulty configuration change,” adding that the company has “no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”
It was not the first time Facebook had experienced an outage. In 2018, Facebook experienced an outage that affected Facebook and Instagram which was caused by a “bug in the server,” the company said at the time.
As this was unfolding at Facebook, one platform was up and running, and its social content team was ready. Twitter seized the opportunity by tweeting “hello literally everyone”.
Not only did Twitter seize the opportunity, its response provided every other brand on its platform a reason and a place to comment, and take their own swing at tapping into this as a cultural moment. It’s the kind of thing that will appear in an ad industry awards case-study video somewhere.
Ever since Oreo dunked in the dark during the Super Bowl in 2013, brands have aimed to create social content that would both capitalise and entertain during a collective experience. With the increasingly fractured media landscape, these moments are few and far between, save for the kind of depressing and tragic news that no brand wants to touch with a 10-foot tweet.
IOL Tech