The Day Facebook and Instagram Went Down

A day without the page

For most of Wednesday and into Thursday, Facebook and Instagram were unavailable or broken for many people. Feeds would not refresh, posts would not publish, and messages sat unsent.

Facebook has since said a server configuration change was to blame. WhatsApp and Messenger were affected too.

For most people it was an inconvenience. For a business whose whole online presence is a Facebook page or an Instagram account, it was a day with no storefront.

Customers looking for the hours, the menu, the phone number or the day's specials found an error, or found nothing at all.

Who was caught out

• The restaurant whose menu and hours live only on its page.
• The market stall that posts each day's location as a Story.
• The salon that takes bookings through Messenger.
• The maker who sells through Instagram messages and comments.
• The business whose website link points to its Facebook page.

The last is more common than it sounds. A listing or a business card sends people to a Facebook address, and on a day like Wednesday that address leads nowhere useful.

Rented space

None of these businesses made a foolish choice. Facebook and Instagram are where many of their customers spend time, and the tools are free and easy.

But a page on someone else's platform is rented space. The landlord decides what is shown, to whom, and, as this week showed, whether it loads at all.

Outages this long are rare. The point is not that it will happen often; it is that when it does, there is nothing you can do from inside the platform.

Falling organic reach since Facebook's news feed change early last year is the quieter version of the same lesson. The audience you built there is not entirely yours to reach.

The places you control

A business can keep its essentials in places that do not depend on any one social platform.

The website, on a domain the business owns, with the hours, the menu or services, the prices, the phone number and a way to get in touch.

The email list, built with customers' permission, which reaches people directly whatever any feed is doing.

And the Google My Business listing, which is often the first thing people see when they search for the business by name. It is a platform too, but a separate one, and it was working on Wednesday.

The website as the address

Every other place the business appears should point back to the website.

The Instagram profile link, the website field on the Facebook page, the email signature, the business card, the listing.

If all of them lead to a site you control, an outage elsewhere removes one route rather than the destination.

That also means the website has to be worth arriving at: current hours, the answers people ask for most, and contact details that work from a phone.

A website that says less than the Facebook page sends people back to Facebook, which defeats the point.

A worked example

A food truck working a rotation of business parks and breweries announced each day's location only on Instagram Stories and its Facebook page.

Last summer its Instagram account was locked for most of a week after a login problem. Regulars had no idea where to find the truck, and the owner had no way to tell them.

The fix was dull. The website gained a page with the weekly schedule, updated every Sunday, and the Instagram profile link was pointed at it.

A short weekly email went to customers who signed up at the window, and the Google My Business listing carried the regular weekday stops in its posts.

On Wednesday the truck could not post either. Its regulars looked at the schedule page instead.

During an outage

When a platform goes down, the useful moves are all elsewhere.

Post on Google My Business if anything about your day has changed. Put a short notice on the website's home page if customers usually book or order through social messages.

If the outage affects orders or appointments, email your list with another way to reach you, usually the phone.

And answer the phone. On a day when messaging fails, people who need you will call, if they can find the number.

Messages that went missing

The cleanup matters as much as the day itself.

Some messages sent during the outage arrived late, and some may not have arrived at all. A customer who booked by message on Wednesday may be waiting for a reply.

Go through Messenger and Instagram messages from Wednesday onward and answer everything. Then post once, plainly: if you messaged us and have not heard back, please call or message again.

It is a small courtesy, and it catches the bookings that would otherwise turn into no-shows or complaints.

A list you can reach

The email list is the asset many businesses with a busy Facebook page lack.

Ask at the counter, on receipts and on the website, and record when and how each person agreed. Canada's anti-spam law requires consent for commercial email, and a clear signup gives you the strongest kind.

Send rarely and usefully. A list that only hears from you when something has gone wrong will not open the message when it matters.

The counter-case

Nothing here is a case for leaving Facebook or Instagram.

For many small businesses they are where customers discover them, and a day's outage does not change that. A business that dropped them in protest would lose far more than it lost on Wednesday.

Some businesses genuinely live in the moment, like a pop-up that exists for one weekend. For them a simple page on the website and a listing may be all the base they need.

Keep using the platforms, and make sure the essentials also live on a website, an email list and a listing that do not depend on them.

This week

1. Reply to every message sent since Wednesday.
2. Check your website has hours, phone and services.
3. Point every profile link at the website.
4. Confirm your Google listing is complete and current.
5. Start an email signup with clear consent.
6. Write an outage notice you can post quickly.
7. Check who can access the Facebook page.

Step two decides what an outage costs. If the website already answers the questions people ask, a day without Facebook is an inconvenience rather than a closure.

Making sure the business can always get back into its own page is covered in who owns the business Facebook page.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.