We’re sure you noticed the big Facebook outage this week. We were made largely aware of this, not just because of our profession as marketers, but also because we suddenly lost our ability to escape for a few moments by watching cute puppy photos on Instagram, and we lost our ability to communicate with friends and family on Facebook & Whatsapp. Some of us had to resort to email, or even phone calls again.
Our reliance on these platforms becomes largely clear during times like these, but luckily systems returned to normal as of Monday evening. Of course, you may be asking, “Well, what exactly happened?” or “What do we do now?”
While we don’t have all the answers yet, we can answer the following:
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What exactly caused the Facebook outage?
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- Luckily, this was not an attempt to hack Facebook, as some people were suspecting. Facebook determined that this was a backend drop-off between their traffic & data centers causing a lapse of signal across the various websites and platforms in the Facebook ecosystem.
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What happened to my campaigns during the time Facebook went down?
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- Due to the complete signal loss across Facebook, ad delivery also paused. We recommend that advertisers keep a close eye on campaign spending and performance over the next few days as the sudden shutdown and restart of these campaigns may have affected bids and learnings.
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How has site data been affected during this outage?
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- As mentioned, with the backend system disconnected, all onsite events collected by the pixel during the outage were not passed back to Facebook. For this reason, it will not be possible to report on performance during those outage hours. We have seen events starting to re-populate in the hours following the outage, but will keep a close eye on any drop-off in pixel signal over the next couple of days.
- For advertisers who have implemented CAPI, events were not passed back to Facebook during these hours. That said, It is possible to resend those events for optimization purposes. Please consult with your development team on how to achieve this if you haven’t done so already.
The team here at Direct Agents will be monitoring the situation closely. We are working with Facebook to gain insight into the full impact of the drop-off and will share additional news as updates arise. Feel free to reach out to [email protected] with any questions!
– Ronnie Andrade Alvarado, Director of Paid Media