In our last blog, we shared our anxiety caused by the day long Facebook and Instagram outage. We were sweating, some tears were shed, and a lot of time was spent calming our poor clients.

The shutdown was covered by major news channels. And once we saw CNN cover this topic, we knew this was serious.

We can go on and on about how it affected a Digital Marketing Agency like us, but we wanted to talk about how it affected the biggest consumers of Insta and Fb.

Instagram Influencers.
This is their platform. This is where they make a living. And that whole platform was simply **poof** gone.

Even for us, not that we have the magical blue verification badge, we had a moment of:

• $%^&! how do we reach our followers?
• How do we communicate to them about this global outage?
• Have we lost anything?

Now imagine being an influencer. You would be thinking:

• %#%$! x 100000
• What do I do, where do I go?
• How long will this outage go for?
• Who will cover for my revenue loss?
• Why is no one explaining anything?
• Where are my ads going? Am I still being charged?
• My deals were done through DMs, I have no access!

What we have to say about this is, we all must realise and remember that you’re renting a space in Instagram. You do not fully own nor control your Instagram profile. When you think this way, your approach to the digital space will completely change.

See what a real business owner experienced during this outage here.

Digital Agencies.
We run multiple accounts. Which means, we had temporarily lost full control and access to all our accounts. We are responsible for the management of these accounts and we had no answers or explanation for our clients.

Consulting Facebook came to a dead-end as no-one was getting through. All we saw was 1 tweet.

The Consumers. The Economy.
With 2.32 BILLION USERS, you can’t ignore the fact that this had a significant effect on the economy. Facebook and Instagram essentially have their own economy –  Facebook Ads revenue was $1.52 BILLION JUST IN THE LAST QUARTER. Where did the revenue go on this day? How did business’ recover?

March 14^th marked a very stressful day and we hope this type of history doesn’t repeat itself, at least anytime soon!