March 13, 2019 - Instagram and Facebook have been down for more than half the day and the internet is losing it's mind! It's almost humorous that a company as large as Facebook can just be down for such long period of time. In the past there have been outages that have lasted a few hours, but in the last 4+ years that I've been active on Instagram as a content creator I've never seen anything like this before.
For a content creator, like me, with over 108,000 followers, what this means is that I just can't post my scheduled content for tonight and I'm not able to connect with my audience through stories for example. I was trying to post a really awesome story of my outfit today, but nope, that's still caught in the spinning wheels of 'not updated'.
Thinking beyond my own side-project here, I can't help to think about the $1,000,000's right now that advertisers had scheduled to go live on Instagram and Facebook during this time. Or if you were doing a paid engagement and the event happened to be today / tonight and no content is able to go-live - what a mess! More interesting will be how Facebook chooses to react to the situation. Are they going to extend campaigns for free or run promotions to try and make up for this? Or are they just going to pretend it never happened and try and move on
It's an opportunity for everyone experience the outage issues to head to other sources for their news such as the local media or, heck, even a newspaper! Wow, imagine that, millennials grabbing a newspaper. Or you can browse my style guide by clicking here for the heck of it!
This outage does not come at a good time for Instagram when a lot of users have been experiencing a lower engagement than they have in recent months and a pattern that has been consistently un-motivating to content creators. The outage could be a catalyst for content creators and brands to starting thinking about content and advertisements on other platforms besides these.
I personally can't wait to see the stats that come out as a result of this! I'll be sure to update the article as we learn more.
As of now this is all I got for you...
