Is it time to start thinking about breaking up with Facebook?

On the 5th of October (AEST) users of Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger & WhatsApp woke up to a global outage.

The reason for the outage is not quite known, however “Facebook's outage appears to be caused by DNS; however that's just a symptom of the problem,” says Troy Mursch, chief research officer of cyber threat intelligence company Bad Packets. The fundamental issue, Mursch says—and other experts agree—is that Facebook has withdrawn the so-called Border Gateway Protocol route that contains the IP addresses of its DNS nameservers.

Coincidently, hours before, a whistleblower accused the social media giant of repeatedly prioritising profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation in a TV interview shortly before the outages.

This isn’t the first time this year there’s been issues with the company. In February, Facebook put a news ban on the platform restricting the media from posting news updates.

The reason?

A dispute over a proposed law which would force it and Google to pay news publishers for content. The treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, and communications minister Paul Fletcher announced a compromise had been reached at the 11th hour, seeing the news ban reversed.

Nic Fren, Founder & CEO of Bespoke Media Group stated “we place too much power & emphasis on Facebook & not enough on other platforms”.

Facebook owns Whatsapp & Instagram. While this could well be a technical glitch, Facebook workers struggled to get it under control remotely & had to drive to the Facebook headquarters to get it back up and running. If it is something else, then we really need to think about Facebook's future & our relationship with the social media giant.

When asked if the outage affected his business, Mr Fren’s response was “well it’s annoying, but not the end of the world for us”. We’ve been building our brand on other sites such as TikTok, Snapchat, Youtube & Google. So, we will communicate to our audience through those channels until this is restored, he states.

It’s imperative that agents really look at their marketing strategies & acknowledge the existence of other platforms. Putting all your eggs in one basket when something like this happens leaves no alternatives to communicate through different channels & leaves you at the mercy of the platforms.

You don’t need to be the master on every platform, however we encourage everyone to really start putting the time and effort into growing other channels for the day Facebook ultimately becomes redundant. Audiences are starting to move onto other platforms and if you are not moving with them, you will be left behind.

Other sites to look at:

1) LinkedIn

2) Twitter

3) YouTube

4) TikTok

5) Snapchat

Bespoke Media Group was the winner of this year's “Best Use of YouTube” at the Social Media Marketing Institute awards.