This past Wednesday, I woke up, brushed my teeth, showered and made my bed. I opened up my phone to check e-mails, saw a memory on my Facebook page that I felt was worth resharing and did. From there, I began my day, packing orders for shipping and restocking some of our deodorants.
A few hours later, I took a break, with every intention of updating our Instagram and Facebook business pages. But that wasn’t going to happen. Not anytime during the early hours of Wednesday nor into the evening hours, because Facebook and Instagram were down for unknown reasons.
Of course, the reason given to the public was that the sites were undergoing maintenance, but, well, you know, I had a hard time believing that as the minutes stretched into hours. I’m sure many others felt the same. I’m again sure there were countless users who run their businesses, literally, from those platforms, who might have been just a little stressed by the outage. I’m also sure that stress grew as the outage ran into the late evening—and, I hear, for some, it ran into the next day. That’s a lot of sures, but I don’t think any are too far fetched.
While it couldn’t have been a good feeling to be reminded we’re at the mercy of someone else on social media, I felt reassured knowing I had other options. Nandi’s Naturals has its own presence on the Web—a presence we’ve maintained since we began selling to the public in 2009. I also maintain a growing, active e-mail list. So, I’m never without a connection to some of my customers. Now, I won’t say that it doesn’t help to have a social media presence, because many of our connections on social media have led to our current customer base, but at least, we have other avenues of reaching out to them, when something as unexpected as this happens.
So, instead of fretting over when two of the largest social media platforms in the world would be back in business, I spent my time making coffee—not because I drink coffee, which I don’t, but because my inventory of our energizing, invigorating “6 AM” coffee-infused soap is running low. That beat picking up my phone every five minutes to check to see if Facebook and Instagram were back online. It also beat sweating big drops because someone might not be able to place an order, if the only place they could do that was through a Facebook or Instagram store.
I’m thinking the outage may have served as a wake-up call for a lot of business owners who have come to rely on the use of another’s servers. Just know, there’s nothing like having your own. I’m so happy we have ours. I got my own reminder that I need to spend more time over here than I do on Facebook and Instagram—and it shouldn’t take an outage for me to do it.
Exactly! I didn’t even know it was down until 2 days later when I was reading someone’s newsletter :)
I’ve always said, don’t rely on social media websites. You never know when they might not pay the bills however in this case I believe it was someone didn’t do their job properly and messed up the server configuration.
Rely on your on supply, that’s my motto :)