Did you unconsciously open Instagram, Facebook, or WhatsApp several times throughout the day on Monday, only to get a “Couldn’t refresh feed” message? Did you try again every 20 or so minutes? Did you maybe even restart your phone, not once thinking websites as large as Facebook could possibly go down and believing it must be your own technology?
Rejoice: it’s not you, it’s them.
Facebook and each of its apps went down around 11:40 a.m. ET Monday morning and stayed down for almost 6 hours due to networking issues.
We began running our own uptime checks for Facebook.com at 4:00 p.m. CT, so we could know the moment it came back up. At 4:45 p.m., we were notified of the site’s returned availability from one of our North American probes.
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What should web professionals think about in the aftermath of an outage like Facebook’s? What are your tips or best practices? Please share your opinion in the comments.
