Even giants have a bad day! On 13 March 2019, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp was down for almost 24 hours.

That was a good lesson for every digital marketing expert out there. We should never rely only in one platform. Bad things happen and we may lose access to our digital accounts in one or more platforms. It’s wise to keep alive the communication with your community through different channels.

Be proactive and have a ready to follow crisis manual when things get out of your control. If any social media channel stops working, have a ready to go back plan in other social media channels.

It’s not a matter of if but when it will happen to anyone of us.

Facebook down

The troubles first hit the social network around 9 a.m. PT Wednesday, according to tracking site Down Detector. At this point on Thursday 14 March 2019, users have regained full access.

On Thursday, Facebook blamed the problem on a server configuration change. It’s believed to be the biggest interruption of service ever suffered by the social network.

Facebook had to turn to its biggest rival Twitter to explain the situation and to inform all users for the current status.

Instagram down

Instagram was also down for several hours, starting at around the same time. However, Instagram’s official Twitter account had the courtesy to post an announcement that they were back in action at 9:41 p.m. PT time on Wednesday.

According to a map by Down Detector, the outage affected users in the US, Europe, South America, Australia and Asia.

The users of Facebook-owned WhatsApp also had troubles sending photos on the app. The Virtual Reality company Oculus (owned by Facebook) also was having trouble and many users reported that had difficulties accessing and using the platform.

#Facebookdown

This isn’t Facebook’s first outage. Don’t get me wrong but this wasn’t the first time. In November, Facebook and Instagram were down for hours because of a server configuration. Before that, it had been a severe outage in 2008, when Facebook had just 125 million users.

We have to mention that this outage affected millions of advertisers who rely on Facebook and Instagram to connect directly with consumers. Facebook’s ad-buying system was also down. Facebook said Wednesday that it might offer refunds to some advertisers.