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Facebook outage should serve as a warning

Facebook’s most recent disruption comes as a warning against overreliance on one platform or communication channel.


On Tuesday morning our time, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp all went offline for 6 hours. This major tech outage resulted in vital communications being severed. Billions of dollars of loss were created as businesses were cut off from their customers globally.

The first outage of its kind since 2019. Notably, there are more than 3.5 billion people around the world using the group of apps for both personal and business purposes.

Facebook VP of Engineering and Infrastructure Santosh Janardhan released a statement on Tuesday saying, “This outage was triggered by the system that manages our global backbone network capacity.” He said, “a command was issued with the intention to assess the availability of global backbone capacity,” which “unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network, effectively disconnecting Facebook data centres globally.”

Among those hit hardest were food services, Facebook games companies, and retail businesses alike. The affect was global. Many companies lost millions of dollars of business revenue in only a few hours. Income which can be the difference between paying rent or electricity for the month in larger companies.

This outage communicated a clear message. It is a warning against keeping too many resources in one place. If the same outage were to occur for a day or more, how would your business react and manage the pressure of lost time online?

How do you stay in touch with clients?

For businesses who are reliant on digital resources – ensuring you have alternative methods to reach clients is of great importance.

Diversify your tech!

While your business may not rely on Facebook or WhatsApp to function, it is important to recognise potential scenarios. Relying too heavily on one platform or technological interface may have devastating results. Even for Facebook – one of the world’s largest online platforms, things still go wrong sometimes. Diversifying your business’s technology may be an important aspect of negating risk.

Create multiple ways clients can contact you.

When intelligently modelling your online visibility, having alternative methods for Customers/Clients to contact you is of great importance. Clients need to be able to find contact details through your own business domain and web presence. This is a great first step in providing resiliency against future outages.

Make sure you have support.

The most significant way you can safeguard yourself against the fallout from technological disruptions? Your best defence is to have an IT support and solutions team like Altitude Innovations on your side. We can help you create a plan when the plan fails or support you by helping you implement and manage sustainable technological solutions. Get in touch with us today to learn more.


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