Facebook and its services Instagram and WhatsApp are back up after six hours of global outage. This is the biggest outage since a bug took the site down for approximately a day in 2008.
However, there were only around 80 million users then. It is thought that there are over 3 billion users across Facebook’s various platforms now, all of whom had no access to their services.
Facebook said in a statement: “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.”
They are yet to disclose why the outage occurred, but an external network monitoring service ThousandEyes, owned by Cisco, thought it to be a DNS failure.
A chance for everyone to respond
In addition to poking fun at defunct apps and platforms such as Vine, many social media users turned to the third of the big social media platforms, Twitter. This resulted in even their own Twitter profile reacting to the news.
Many brands were quick to jump on the news and produced humorous tweets regarding the situation. This included Instagram and WhatsApp themselves. Though it meant that many organisations were not able to connect to their platforms, they were still able to create interactions with their customers and a little buzz.
Major outages happen rarely, but they are something affiliate managers should be aware of for the future. Being able to capitalise on an outage that would otherwise have major implications and issues for them, could result in some interest and a chance to build an audience in a way that you will rarely see elsewhere. Affiliate managers should try to look past the initial issue – Facebook being down – and try to see what other opportunities there are.
