You’re minding your own business when all of the sudden Facebook crashes. What do you do – Scream? Cry? Slam your fingers on random keys in frustration? Vent in 140 characters? Today, for the third time in three weeks, Facebook users temporarily experienced an outage. For most Facebookers, this was at most a mild irritation. Let’s be real, you probably should’ve been doing something better than creeping on your roommate’s cousin’s sister’s best friend.
With nowhere else to go, many took to Twitter to complain about the disruption and thus the hashtag #FacebookDown was born. The witty hashtag was accompanied by hilarious memes, blood moon theories and cries for interweb justice. In mere minutes, Viners had created videos, Instagrams were uploaded and thousands of angry tweets were curated based solely on the Facebook crash. News outlets even took to social media to comment on the crash.
However, for a much smaller group of people, the outage went beyond a simple buzz kill. I’m talking about anyone and everyone whose jobs are in social media, marketing, so on and so forth. I found Good Morning America’s post-crash status interesting – “Facebook was down again — cannot confirm if productivity soared at workplaces…” Although it was meant to be comedic, on the behalf of everyone in social media, I can personally tell you that workplace productivity was at an all-time low. Boosts wouldn’t go through, client data was unreachable and time-sensitive posts became even more urgent. A black hole opened up in the middle of our office and sucked all of our souls through the floor. Was that a little bit dramatic? Maybe, but that’s how it felt for the whole 7 minutes and 43 seconds that Facebook wasn’t working.
With all that being said, I have a request for all of the recreational Facebookers out there. Next time Facebook has a fluke, take a second to think about the people on the other side. If your favorite brand doesn’t immediately answer the request about your broken earbuds, be patient and give them some slack. Trust me, we’re just as frustrated as you are! And after all, there’s a human on the other end of that funny Facebook post you just tagged your friend in.
