You may or may not know but there was a global outage across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp today which affected the uploading, sending and displaying of videos, images and other files across their suite of apps.
Everything is back to normal now, but if you were online during this time you may have noticed all manner of weird things in your timeline like grey boxes where images should be, text in place of images and formatting issues across all the feeds.
Now, whilst this may seem like a fairly innocuous error from the outset this does have implications for you and your business, particularly if you are running paid ads and campaigns during this time. Ask yourself, what’s the point in paying for that real estate in the news feed, or right column if Facebook is having issues displaying it correctly? There isn’t!
Issues like this, if left untouched can end up wasting budget trying to show ads to people who can’t see them due to the fault. Even though Facebook acknowledges there has been an issue on their platform I highly suspect there will be little to no compensation paid out to ad accounts with ads affected by this.
What your agency or marketing team should be doing is ensuring that your ads are switched off during this time. Whilst it isn’t preferable to turn campaigns on and off (especially if they are performing well) the difference between the potential loss in wasted budget vs a few hours of downtime and the resulting optimisations that need to occur when you fire an ad account backup will, in my opinion, far outweigh it.
I would hope thousands of emails were sent to clients this morning informing them of the outage to a) keep them in the loop and b) to let them know you’re being proactive. After all, we want the best results possible for our clients and if that means it’s in their best interests to have things turned off completely for a few hours then that’s a stance we will stand firmly by for the greater good!
Did you know about the outage today? We’re you affected by it? Let us know! Similarly, shoot us a message if you want to speak to us about your paid social campaigns. Our team are always happy to have a chinwag about your current paid activity and any ways in which we think we could help you improve!
