Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are Down

You may have happened to be scrolling through Facebook or Instagram and noticed that it suddenly stopped working! What happened? Is it your connection? Well, it’s safe to say that it’s not just you who is experiencing this outage of apps. 

In times like these, everybody rushes to Twitter to see what’s going on. Here’s what we know so far and what it could mean for businesses that rely on these apps.

What We Know so Far

According to HubSpot, Facebook and Instagram crashed at around 11:45 AM, on October 04, 2021. As of now, the cause of the server’s crashing has not been reported, but many people say they received a “Domain Name System” (DNS) error on Facebook’s webpage.

Downdetector, a program that tracts outages reports that over 50,000 people reported issues with Facebook and Instagram. I know I did, I was on a Facebook page for one of our clients, and all of the sudden, an error message popped up. 

The official Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp Twitter accounts have all released a similar statement saying that they are aware of the issues people are reporting and are working to solve the issue.

I thought it was just my bad connection at first until a co-worker said that the platforms were officially down. What a crazy way to start the workweek, am I right? This leads to another issue though. 

When apps like these crash, people like to make memes and jokes out of them. However, for the businesses that heavily rely on social media to make a profit for themselves, this is no joking matter.

How App Crashes Affect Businesses

The digital world we live in can be a beautiful and helpful tool to further our reach. Whether it be to make connections with people from across the world or to help your business grow, social media platforms play a huge and important role in our lives.

When these apps experience outages, like this current one, it can be detrimental to the small businesses that rely on them. It could be to engage with their customers, answer questions they may have, or finalize a sale of a product. 

All of this comes to a grinding halt once these apps are down for the count. This puts people’s businesses on hold until the problem can be fixed. Which could mean less profit for a business.

Apps crashing is inevitable, just like everything else we use, things break and have problems. However, it seems like these big-name apps experience frequent outages. You would think for such big-name apps and people behind it, that something like this wouldn’t happen as much.

What Can be Done?

Luckily, we haven’t experienced a scenario where every single social media app has crashed at the same time. So while some apps may be unavailable right now, utilize the other apps to engage with your audiences and give them updates. 

You can also encourage them to reach out to your business on other platforms, or through email if they need anything. Whenever something like this happens, it’s important to keep your consumers up-to-date on the situation and what you’re doing to adapt to it. Don’t let these outages get the best of you and your business. You can adapt.

It’s important to be able to adapt to changing scenarios, and this one is no different. So one way you can try to lighten the mood is by joining the hashtags that are always trending when a specific app is down. Using these hashtags could get your business some attention as people love to scroll through the hashtags and read people’s comments.

Check Back For Updates

As this is a continuing issue we’re monitoring, feel free to come back here as we will continue to provide you with updates once they become available to us. You can also reach out to us on Twitter @bureau_web and ask us questions or share how these outages are affecting you.