Today I’m sure that many of you have seen that Facebook was down. Ok, it wasn’t just down. It basically disappeared. Plus, it wasn’t just Facebook, but also Facebook owned Instagram and Whatsapp. That’s a really big deal and a massive outage. In fact, Whatsapp might be the biggest one since in many countries outside the US, Whatsapp is the most common option for text messaging.
We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
— Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021
Facebook hasn’t given a lot of details on what happened. However, little by little reports are trickling out about it. I read that Facebook employees were calling this a “snow day” since they couldn’t even access other apps they use to do their work. They couldn’t even get through the doors that must require electronic access. Facebook did say it’s coming back now:
To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.
— Facebook (@Facebook) October 4, 2021
If you want the nerdy description of some of what is happening check out this Twitter thread from Rob Graham.
When I see something like this happen, I like to ask “What can healthcare learn from this incident?”
The biggest takeaway every healthcare organization should take is that if Facebook can go down, so can you. I think there are many in healthcare who approach downtime in their organization as ignorance is bliss. To be honest, if you’ve made a strong effort to ensure uptime, then you should be confident that your applications will be resilient and not go down. You shouldn’t be kept up at night worrying about it. However, arrogance always seems to come back to bite tech people.
While we still don’t know exactly why Facebook had this issue, there’s probably also a lesson here about healthcare CIOs allowing for mistakes. Facebook certainly has some of the best engineers in the world and yet something went wrong. If you don’t think the same could happen in healthcare, then you’re kidding yourself. Unfortunately, there are a lot of humans involved in technology and humans make mistakes. Accountability for your mistakes, absolutely! Shaming them because they weren’t perfect, that doesn’t help anyone.
Of course, this incident brought to light a few other interesting societal commentary and questions. Here’s a fascinating one which might not be completely accurate, but directionally feels right:
So… roughly 20-25% off all mobile traffic in 🇳🇱 is insta/fb/whatsapp? 🤔https://t.co/fC2RQYlvr4 pic.twitter.com/2IU4Chg4bj
— ᗰᗩᖇᑕO 🚶🏼🐕 (@marcodavids) October 4, 2021
I think every country would have a similar graph. We can all look at our personal phones and likely see similar bandwidth usage. It’s pretty amazing how pervasive social media use is in our lives. Knowing how many Facebook interactions during a graveyard shift I’ve had with my cousin that’s a nurse illustrates that healthcare isn’t immune to it.
This one should make all of us who use social media pause and think:
I have never seen the internet as a happy as it is with Facebook and Instagram gone.
Good times and breathe that fresh air. #health
— Dutch Rojas (@DutchRojas) October 4, 2021
Maybe we all need a breathe of fresh air. Although, I do find it ironic that he shared this idea on Twitter. In fact, Facebook shared the outage on Twitter. The need and desire to connect and share is never going to end.
