The impact of Facebook Outage on Social Media Users

Dr Imran Khan, Senior Lecturer in Digital Marketing in the University of Wolverhampton Business School, blogs about the recent Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp outage.

Facebook and its other family applications Instagram and WhatsApp were down for around 6 hours in a widespread outage recently.

In these 6 hours, Facebook lost up to $60 million revenue and its shares also fell by 4.9%. The Facebook outage affected tens of millions of users across the globe. Facebook is the biggest social media platform with around 2.8 billion active users. This outage has impacted Facebook and its different users differently.

Many businesses use the power of social media platforms for social commerce. Social commerce is emerging and creating new opportunities for big and small businesses. Facebook outage has affected many small businesses who are doing social commerce. According to marketing experts, people have been spending on ad campaigns when there was actually no one to see the ads. Moreover, there was a drop in leads and conversation for the businesses who advertise on Facebook. It was a bad day for small businesses who rely solely on these social media platforms, however, perhaps they have now realised it is not wise to put all of your eggs in one social media basket.

The Facebook blackout also affected social media influencers. Instagram and Facebook are two of the most popular social media platforms for influencers. Another study reveals that 92% of influencers planned to make Instagram their number one social media platform followed by Facebook and YouTube. This outage was an emergency alarm for some small social media influencers, especially for those who use these platforms to communicate with their audiences. Some of the influencers even had to put their sponsored posts on hold.

Finally, it was a very good opportunity for other social media platform like Twitter and TikTok. There were many new Facebook and Instagram users exploring these platforms. Meanwhile, Twitter users were also enjoying the situation by  making jokes about the outage.

This event is a reminder for businesses, influencers and users not to rely too much on one platform.