07 Oct The Social Media Outage
On Monday, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus went down. Was your business impacted by it? Did you hardly even notice?
Key topics:
✔️ As I’ve said repeatedly: the future is now. Censorship. Banning & shadow banning. Was the outage really caused by a network problem or was it something else? I dunno, but I do know that if you’re still out there basing your entire income on a platform you don’t own or control, you’re playing with fire.
✔️ Do you have access to your own data? If you’ve been talking to JKTheButterfly82634 on social media and don’t know her actual name and email address, how would you reach her again if that platform died?
✔️ Nothing is too big or too popular to fail. Remember the mess with Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers? Or Enron?
Link to Verge article I mention: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/4/22708989/instagram-facebook-outage-messenger-whatsapp-error
Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/
Transcription by Otter.ai. Please forgive any typos!
Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com. And now here’s your host, Sara Causey.
Hello, Hello, and thanks for tuning in. Today’s episode may be a little bit shorter than usual, but I am up to my eyeballs in things to do and it doesn’t seem to be letting up. So I wanted to hop on and record this episode because I felt like I would be absolutely remiss if I did not. Back on July 6 of 2020, in Episode 16 of this podcast, I recorded an episode called Do you know you could survive? And one of my key topics in that episode was asking the question, is your business built around only one revenue stream? Or have you built an entire business around a platform that you do not own or control? I get DMs and emails constantly from people who claim to be an expert in whatever just insert social media platform here, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, whatever. And it’s like, yeah, so what are you going to do? If you ever got banned or shadow banned? If the algorithm changed in such a way that you couldn’t do your schtick anymore? What is the website died? What if it went away? What if it just was no more? People always laugh, like, oh, Facebook is so in the fabric of everything. And it’s like, hmm, I’m old enough to remember whom we were all on MySpace and logging your top eight was the thing to do. Sometimes things come and go. And no matter how, quote steady or stable, they may seem to be in the present moment, it doesn’t mean it will be that way tomorrow. I also made a Do you know you could survive redux episode on January 21 of this year, and it’s Episode 61 if you want to tune into it. Again to say like, here’s your wake up call. Because in light of the censorship, people getting banned, or shadow banned, or just kicked off the platform, like just getting pack your sh!t, and get the hell off of here. It’s like, um, are you sure that you really want to put all of your eggs in that basket? On Monday of this week, Facebook went down. And I don’t know, I think the official story is that it had something to do with network issues. But it also took down Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus. And it was like anything that was getting routed through Facebook, which I think apparently is everything that Facebook does gets rerouted back through itself. It just it all went down. And I’m sitting here thinking if your business was predicated on your ability to interact with people on Facebook, or Instagram, every single day, or that was the only way that you knew how to make money was to get in somebody’s DMs and tell them what an expert you are on Facebook and how you can make them millions of dollars. What are what are you doing? Like how are you? How are you feeling today? How are you living in the world? And to answer that sort of question. I’m going to read a passage from an article in The Verge and it says “the outage started just before noon eastern time and took nearly six hours before it was resolved. This is the worst outage for Facebook since a 2019. incident took its site offline for more than 24 hours, as the downtime hit hardest on the small businesses and creators who rely on these services for their income.” Now, we can speculate all day long. What was this really some kind of networking accident or problem? Was it hackers? Was it foreign interference? Did it have something to do with whistleblower testimony on Tuesday of this week? I mean, it seems awfully coincidental to me that this outage would happen in such close proximity to that. I don’t know. And I’m not really going to use this time on the airwaves to speculate on it. Other than to say, I don’t know, the main point that I want to make here is if you have leveraged your ability to eat, to pay your bills to take care of your family, on a platform that you neither own nor control, you’re playing a very dangerous game. And it’s even more dangerous if you’re not backing up your data. If you don’t have contact information for your clients and your prospects. If you know that you’ve been talking to JaneDoe1654 on Facebook Messenger or that’s her Instagram handle, but you don’t have any of Jane’s actual information, have her telephone number, you don’t have an email address, you have no way of being able to reach her outside of that platform. And there may not be any way that she would be able to find you or would even think of you if that media platform collapsed. What are you going to do? And this is not, by the way, a rhetorical question. I am asking you pretend that I’m sitting right there with you. And we’re in a coaching session and I’m asking you point blank, what are you going to do? If you don’t have a plan B or a Plan C in place for what would happen in if you had to go through some social media nuclear fallout getting banned or shadow banned, not being able to make your living there anywhere anymore? Or the platform not existing anymore? What are you going to do? Do you know that you could survive? In my opinion, some of the people who are out there trolling others, they’re just there all the time in your inbox, trying to sell you something that you haven’t asked for, you don’t want, you don’t need and they’re just persistent. They’re like ants at a picnic or a fly that just won’t stop buzzing you and bothering you, and you’re trying to work and do what you need to do. If they go out of business. I’m sorry, but I shed no tears, go find something else to do with your time that’s more productive. And that is providing a service or creating value in some way other than just spam, spam, spam, spam, or like the people on LinkedIn, that’ll be like, Oh, I saw that you celebrated Bob Smith’s promotion, and then they try to use something that random to springboard into a conversation to sell you something. If all of those grifters just disappeared, and they went out of business due to the fact that they couldn’t figure out something else to do if LinkedIn went bye-bye tomorrow. You know, I can’t say that I would feel overly sad about that. So the takeaway in this episode is the future is now. Censorship is here, getting cancelled, getting banned, getting shadow banned, all of that stuff is here. And frankly, the possibility of these social media outlets being taken away from you whether it’s, who knows what was real really responsible for it, but whether it was hackers, whether it was foreign interference, whether it was just legitimate technical problems which, wink wink, I’m sure it really was. If it all went went away tomorrow, if your moneymaker is Facebook and that went away, or your moneymaker was spamming people on LinkedIn and trying to sell them your razzle dazzle on how you’re going to make them a LinkedIn millionaire, if it all went away tomorrow, do you know that you could survive? If the answer to that question is not a resounding yes, then this is a really fantastic time to start war-gaming out your strategies so that you know what you would do in case of an emergency.
We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you haven’t already, please take a quick second to subscribe to this podcast and share it with your friends. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll see you next time.
No Comments