What happens when social media takes the day off?

Facebook, Instagram outage strikes web on Wednesday

Facebook and Instagram had a widespread outage on Wednesday, affecting users in Europe, Canada and the U.S. We even had reports of user issues here in Yuma.

According to a report on CNET, a networking issue caused some people to have trouble accessing Facebook services.

In some cases, the post box was missing, and some reported that Facebook was not opening at all, instead showing just a blank white page.

The outage was not a 100 percent blanket outage. Even at the Yuma Sun, one employee could access a fully functioning Facebook while a co-worker had no access whatsoever.

The news might not seem like a big deal. However, consider this: Facebook has 2 billion monthly users, according to a June CNBC report, and Instagram has 700 million monthly active users. Twitter, in comparison, has 328 million monthly active users, while Snapchat is at 166 million daily active users.

When Facebook and Instagram go down, people tend to notice.

Some users were flummoxed by the situation. Imagine if your job involved postings on social media. Having two major platforms go down can cause quite an impact.

On Twitter Wednesday afternoon, the hashtag #facebookdown was trending. And the posts were pretty entertaining and some were sobering. One tweet, posted by @WiliamNiranen, noted “#facebookdown Anyone knows how actual real human contact work now what Facebook is down?”

Another user, @dmpinder, pointed out something that was likely spot on: “Facebook is down, global productivity is up. #facebookdown”

And that is an interesting point. Social media can be a tremendous time consumer. A user may pop in to check on something quickly, and suddenly, 30 minutes have evaporated, lost as one runs through all the new postings in their news feed.

Maybe a day without social media wouldn’t be a bad thing. Imagine the actual verbal communications one could have with family members, and the amount of work — be it office work or chores at home — that one could accomplish, if social media disappeared for the day.

What do you think, readers? Were you impacted by the Facebook and Twitter outages, or was the outage no big deal? Let us know. Share your thoughts online at www.YumaSun.com, or send us a Letter to the Editor at letters@yumasun.com.