Last night Facebook reminded us all how central its services are to our lives. How many times did you tap on your phone to see if your most recent WhatsApp message was sent? What about scrolling through Instagram hoping to see fresh content come through? Or being sad that you couldn't comment on a post from some misinformed user on Facebook?
Over the last few years there have been occasions when one of the Facebook applications went down, but outages were usually localised. Last night, all three applications - Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp - dropped globally for a few hours. Apparently, Twitter clocked record usage, and ironically Facebook used Twitter to keep users updated with the progress of their recovery attempts.
Facebook has yet to clarify what caused the problem. It could have been a cyberattack, but according to the few articles I read this morning, it seems more likely that it was caused by human error. Those seven hours of downtime are estimated to have cost Facebook around $100 million in potential revenue. Ouch, imagine being the person responsible for R1.5 billion in lost sales.
Facebook shares were down 5% yesterday. If anything, people should have been buying not selling, after noting that our lives are more dependent on Facebook platforms than ever before.