is Facebook down? the myth of forever on social media

You wake up in the morning, stretch, check the time – you still have a couple minutes before you need to get out of bed so you reach over and pick up your phone and open Instagram.

Something went wrong. Couldn't refresh feed.

You try Facebook. Same message.

You try Threads, Messenger, WhatsApp. Same thing.

You start to panic.

"Have I been hacked?" you wonder as your brain begins to race, "Did they shut down my accounts?"

You get out of bed and race to your computer to check if maybe it's just a problem with the mobile apps.

But here too, you've been locked out.

Okay so you've either been hacked, your accounts have all been restricted or there's something wrong in the Metaverse.

You're praying to God it's the latter because your business cannot afford the former.

You're thinking about all the leads you may have lost, all the content you've created, all the followers you've amassed through your hard work over the years. You can't think about it, you might break down.

So you find yourself on Twitter or X or whatever the bird platform is calling itself these days – Facebook and IG are trending. Both platforms are down.

Praises 🙌 you can breathe a sigh of relief.

But why did you need to have this anxiety in the first place?

the myth of forever on social media

Collectively, we have bought into the lie that social media will always be around. That we will always have access to these platforms.

The truth is, when you build your brand on social media alone, it doesn't belong to you.

Today, tens of thousands of people lost access to Meta apps including Facebook and Instagram.

A similar occurrence happened back in October 2021 when all Meta services disappeared from the internet globally for more than 5 hours.

What this tells us is that at any point, you can lose access to your social media accounts.

There are countless stories of creators being hacked, blocked or restricted for some reason and having to start their accounts all over after having lost all of their precious data.

There are also countless stories of content being removed from social media platforms for one reason or another – some more legitimate than others.

It happened to a friend of mine earlier this year. I'm sure it's happened to you or someone in your orbit too.

What this tells us is: what we put on social media is not guaranteed to last.

On social media, you don't own your data

Regardless of what you believe, this outage and the outage of October 2021 makes one thing resoundingly clear:

We do not own the data we put onto social media platforms.

We just don't.

Our ability to use these platforms is entirely dependent on external factors.

If Mark Zuckerberg and company wake up one morning and decide to burn all of Meta's apps and services to the ground, there's nothing that we can do about it but say "well, f*ck me".

So why are we building our businesses in a way that is entirely dependent on these platforms?

Any marketer or business advisor worth their salt will tell you that you need a website and an email list - you need something outside of social media that you own. That is definitively yours.

Because these apps don't belong to you.

Not your content. Not your leads. Not your data.

Nothing that you put on social media is your own.

And you simply cannot build a sustainable business on social media alone.

Is there more to this story?

As the reports of Facebook, Instagram and other services being down ramped up, over on X, people began speculating about how and why this outage occurred.

We know without a doubt that Meta's user data has been used to manipulate elections and sway voters in several countries.

This isn't conspiracy. We know this for a fact.

Just search 'Facebook election lawsuit' or 'Facebook Cambridge-Analytica' and you'll find all the information you need.

So when I looked at the maps of today's Meta services outage and the Super Tuesday map, I can't say I was surprised when an eerily familiar picture began to emerge.

Granted, the maps do not fit together perfectly – but the similarities and apparent correlations are hard to ignore.

Also, I'm currently located in the Southern Caribbean and I, too, experienced outages in Meta services today. So clearly this wasn't just a US-based problem.

Still, it begs the question – why were there outages in some areas and not others? And why these areas in particular?

It also begs the question of how much control do these apps have over our perception of reality. How much control are we giving to our algorithmic overlords?

I won't speculate about an answer. But it's some food for thought.

What do you think? Was Facebook down for you?

Leave a comment and share your thoughts or experiences.

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