Productivity Lessons from the Facebook Outage

When Facebook crashed last week, millions of people around the world were sent into a tizzy. In addition to the Facebook outage, Instagram and WhatsApp (both owned by Facebook) also went down. All three platforms were offline for six hours.

Here are some takeaways from the Facebook outage.

Do you have a back-up communications plan?

Many businesses use Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp for their communications. When
the crash happened, their communications came to a standstill. It’s important to have a
contingency plan for communications should your main platform become unusable.

Do you have a back-up e-commerce plan?

There are a growing number of businesses that conduct their sales through e-commerce options that Facebook offers. If this platform is not in operation for more than an hour and/or if you’re unsure when service will return, do you have an alternate method for conducting business so that you don’t lose revenue during the outage?

Is your entire world held within one company?

Some people and organizations have all of their communications, operations, documentation, and data stored within Facebook and WhatsApp. They had zero access to every single component of their business. The same could happen to Microsoft and its family of businesses or Apple. While it’s convenient to keep all facets of your business or
life stored within one platform so you save time from not switching back and forth between platforms, you also risk your business or life coming to a standstill when outages happen. Have a contingency plan for how you can access a backup of these operations or consider using more than one platform to house different components of your business.

Did you survive not getting sucked into Facebook or Instagram?

There are many people in this world who do not realize how much time they spend on social media on any given day. We’re not talking about people who have jobs that require them to monitor their company brand or answer customer questions on social media platforms. We’re talking about the daily personal use of social media – sharing with the world your thoughts or activities, scrolling through updates to look at what other people are posting, and following a trail of posts that causes you to lose a few minutes here, a few minutes there, adding up to an hour or more of your time lost each day. If you’re still alive and reading this you survived not spending time within those platforms. Or did you instead seek out Twitter, Pinterest or YouTube in order to escape?

There are positives to social media platforms, but there are also many negatives.

Hopefully, you took stock of this during the Facebook outage and will take steps to adjust your operations accordingly.

For the complete guide to improved productivity, check out The Inefficiency Assassin: Time Management Tactics for Working Smarter, Not Longer.