What a total nightmare for Facebook last week.
In case you were hiding in a cave somewhere, all of its products went down at the same time… and they didn’t work properly for SIX HOURS.
Yes, the world discovered at the same time just how reliant its become on WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and of course Facebook itself.
Meantime Twitter was flooded with attention. It’s best tweet read “Hello literally everyone”.
For many people, this outage started with the belief their phones weren’t working properly. We certainly had a few more support calls from people who’d turned their phones on and off again, and were worried they didn’t seem to have any messaging.
Then it started to click on Twitter and in news outlets across the world. Somehow, all of Facebook’s products were down at once.
Had they been hacked? Had Mark Zuckerberg decided to shut down the company?
Ironically, this big problem was caused by something tiny.
An engineer made a mistake with a routine maintenance job, and accidentally disconnected all of Facebook’s data centres.
Oops.
It took some time for the right people to get access to the right data centres to fix it. And then they had to bring everything back online carefully, so that a massive flood on traffic didn’t just take it down again.
How was your business affected by the Great Facebook Outage of October 2021? And has it made you consider how you use its products for company messaging?