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It did not take long for the world to catch on that Facebook and Instagram were down. This is a challenge for us, as we are constantly posting on behalf of clients, running and analyzing digital ads, and checking all of our metrics to deliver reports. While the platforms do routine maintenance, an outage this big and for this long is news to users. After a refresh or two, thousands of users took to Twitter as their news source, only to find what they feared most: Facebook really is down. Messenger and Instagram seemed also to be affected, while What’s App appeared to be working smoothly still.
At the beginning of the outage, many users reported seeing messages of routine maintenance, promising to be back in a few minutes. However, after an hour, users started to get suspicious.
According to downdetector.com, it appears to be more than routine maintenance. It looks like this outage is being felt across the Americas and Europe.
As a social media content editor myself, this outage obviously affects my job. Curious how other companies are dealing with the outage, I reached out to my friend Travis Lyles at The Washington Post who is a social media editor there. At first, he didn’t seem too concerned, assuming it was routine. However, as breaking news entered the newsroom, his social media posts had no choice but to sit in the queue. It dawned on me while we were speaking that even my process of gathering news from sources was disrupted by the outage. I asked Lyles what they do when they have breaking news and broken platforms:
“When this happens we lean on Twitter, and obviously our push alerts,” said Lyles. “It’s got to be a bug that they are trying to fix.”
It seems KWSM, our clients, and The Washington Post aren’t the only ones having to lean on Twiter today – Facebook was forced to take to Twitter to attempt to speak to users and calm fears.
So now, we wait. And we scroll Twitter, the hero of March 13th, 2019.
And since we are all waiting… here are some of the funniest current tweets regarding the outage:
While we are down, now is a great time to plan out your content for the next week. Having trouble? Let the team at KWSM help! We offer content creation services, social media management and much more. Contact us today!
