In early October good old Facebook went down along with all its affiliate apps (Instagram & WhatsApp) for a good 6 hours. The longest outage for over 2 years, but what caused this? A hack? Disgruntled whistle-blowers? Neither according to their Vice president of infrastructure “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication”. In short a faulty configuration change meant that the entire Facebook network went down. Not only the user facing platforms but internal comms channels, physical access at the data centres and offices and even 3rd party communication apps with “Sign-In With Facebook” features. Meaning even when the issue was discovered it still took them time to resolve the issue due to communications and access being taken down.
How did this affect your brand or business?
Ad revenue makes up the lions share of revenue generated by Facebook and with the platform being doing for close to 6 hours, substantial ad money was lost. But the advertisers also lost out, for many businesses, the platform is crucial to generate interest and conversions. The outage meant some were unable to do business, others migrated to Twitter to capitalise on some moment marketing poking fun at the big blue. If anything the outage brought on a clear sign that advertisers need to look at long term and proactive mitigation plans in the reliance on the channel, it’s not the first time they’ve gone down and it wont be the last.