Was social media outage a bad thing?

For office workers, there’s a good chance productivity actually increased Tuesday

Did you see an uptick in productivity at the office Tuesday morning?

We’re guessing a lot of local businesses did, thanks to an outage at Facebook, Threads and Instagram Tuesday morning.

The outage was a nationwide event, with users across the country reporting being locked out of their Facebook accounts, while their Threads and Instagram accounts weren’t updating, the Associated Press reported. The outage impacted some users in Yuma County as well.

As many as 500,000 Facebook users reported having issues logging in or accessing their accounts by mid-morning Eastern Time Tuesday, according to Downdetector, CNN reported.

Some found they had been logged out of their accounts, while others got notifications that “something went wrong,” CNN reported.

‘Meta’s status page on Tuesday showed ‘major disruptions’ impacting Facebook login, as well as some other areas of the platform,” CNN noted.

However, by 10 a.m. Yuma time, Meta had resolved the issue, CNN reported.

Now, some Yumans may not have noticed the disruption.

But for others, it may have been a shock to the system.

It’s really easy to take a “mental break” and hop on social media for a few minutes in between projects, and the next thing you know, 20 minutes has past and actual work? It’s fallen by the wayside.

Linkedin cited a study that noted, “Unrestricted use of social media in the workplace has a negative impact on team productivity. Employees can spend around 40–45 min on social media during working hours for non-work-related purposes. Because of such social media overuse, 9.5% of employee productivity is draining down the hole on a daily basis.”

It’s a never-ending challenge. Social media provides little notifications, letting people know there’s something new to see or respond to, and every one of those notifications is a lure to draw users right back in.

Linkedin notes that social media “can create a sense of constant stimulation that can be addictive and make it difficult to focus on deep work,” creating a “dopamine hit” that leaves users craving more.

What happens when social media takes a mental break, as happened on Tuesday morning? We can only think that once the initial shock wore off, and people stopped trying to log in over and over again, that productivity at work increased, at least a little bit, for a little while!

What do you think, readers? Is social media a drain on productivity, or is it a nice mental break?

Let us know. Share your thoughts with a Letter to the Editor at letters@yumasun.com!

Unsigned editorials represent the viewpoint of this newspaper rather than an individual. Columns and letters to the editor represent the viewpoints of the persons writing them and do not necessarily represent the views of the Yuma Sun.