The karaoke bar in Southeast was half full last night and the host, who calls everybody baby, could not pull up a single lyric video, because a third of the internet had spent the afternoon on the floor. Somebody sang Take On Me entirely from memory. It was not good. It was extremely committed.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were gone for roughly six hours yesterday. A routing configuration error, the kind of thing that lives four layers below anything a marketing team ever touches, and the whole surface simply went away.
Not slow. Not glitchy. Gone.
And here is what most brands did about it. Nothing. Again. They opened Twitter, made a joke about touching grass, and waited for the landlord to fix the building.
Everything you own on someone else's platform stopped existing at one in the afternoon, and the only brands that could still reach a human being were the ones who had bothered to collect an email address.
I watched this from the client side all afternoon. Two of them had posts scheduled into a void. One was on day three of a two week paid flight, spending nothing, reaching nobody, with a launch date that does not move. One runs its entire customer service queue through Instagram DMs, which means that for six hours the company had no customer service and, worse, no way to tell anyone so.
That last one is the real story and it is much bigger than our little industry. In a lot of the world WhatsApp is not a marketing channel. It is the phone. Small businesses take orders on it and get paid through it. Yesterday they took none.
Three things to do this week, none of which require a budget conversation. One, write down every channel you could not rebuild yourself and put a person's name next to each. Two, get your owned list into a state where somebody could actually send to it within the hour, not within the quarter. Three, decide now what you say when a platform goes dark, because writing crisis copy during a crisis is how brands end up sounding like a form letter with a fever.
None of this is an argument for abandoning the platforms. I am not going to pretend the reach is not real. It is an argument for knowing which parts of your brand are yours and which parts are rented, and for being honest in the planning meeting about which column the good numbers are sitting in.
Not slow. Not glitchy. Gone.
Truffles slept through the outage in the window and Barnaby spent it hunting a bottle cap, and neither of them noticed that a large portion of the world had lost its front door. I got home late and hoarse and made a list. The list is on paper. Paper stayed up.