Facebook and Instagram went down on Sunday and Meta never explained why: the lesson for your business

If Facebook wouldn't load on Sunday, it wasn't you

This Sunday the 19th, thousands of people ran into the same wall: Facebook was down. Instagram, on and off, too. Logins failed, feeds wouldn't load, and on desktop Facebook went as far as showing an unsettling "Account Temporarily Unavailable" message — which more than a few people read as "my account's been stolen".

No, it hadn't been stolen. It was an outage across Meta's platforms: in the United States alone, over 23,000 problem reports for Facebook and around 18,000 for Instagram piled up in little more than an hour, with reports coming in from many other countries as well. The mobile app kept working for a fair number of people; on the browser the damage was worse. WhatsApp, this time, was spared.

An hour and a half later, everything was back to normal as if nothing had happened.

The most striking part: the silence

Here's the interesting bit. Do you know what explanation Meta — one of the largest companies on the planet — has given about what happened, why, and whether it could happen again?

None. No statement, no apology, no "we're looking into it". The platforms came back and that was that. And as users we accept it, because we don't pay for Facebook and there isn't much we can demand.

But switch hats for a moment: you're not a user now, you're a business. A shop announcing its offers on Instagram, a hair salon taking bookings through Facebook, a restaurant whose reservations arrive by direct message. On Sunday morning your shop window shut without warning, without explanation, and without you being able to do a single thing about it. And if it happens again tomorrow — or lasts six hours instead of an hour and a half — same story.

Does this affect you?

If your online presence lives only inside social networks, yes — more than it seems:

• It's not your house, it's a rental. Someone else sets the rules, someone else has the outages, and the explanations — as Sunday showed — never come. Your Facebook page can vanish, get blocked by mistake or quietly stop reaching your followers, and there's no complaints desk to turn to.
• Your customers aren't yours. Your followers live in Meta's databases. If the account goes, they go with it. You don't have their email, you don't have their phone number: you have no way to tell them you're still open.
• Outages never announce themselves. This one was short and on a Sunday. June's hit midweek. The next one, who knows. If your campaign, your launch or your biggest sales day lands on one, there's no plan B.

For the record: we're not telling you to quit social media. It's a great channel for reaching new people, and some businesses thrive on it. What we're saying is something else: don't let it be your only ground to stand on.

What you can do today, in three moves

1. Own your house: have your own website. Even a simple one. A site with your name, your services, your phone and your address that keeps working even if all of Meta goes down. It's yours, nobody can shut it on you, and you set the rules.
2. Keep your customers' contact details outside the networks. A simple list of emails or phone numbers — collected with permission — is worth gold the day a platform fails or blocks your account. It's the difference between "I've lost my followers" and "I'll reach them another way".
3. Make the networks point to your house, not the other way round. The Instagram shop window is great for attracting people; the sale, the booking or the enquiry belongs on your website. That way every follower who arrives becomes something you actually control.

And if that sounds like a lot of work — that's what we're here for

Building that house of your own — a fast, secure website that doesn't fall over at the first gust — is literally our job. We take care of the server, the backups, the loading speed and the monitoring so you don't have to think about any of it: you run your business, we hold up the technical side.

If Sunday's scare made you think "what if that happens to me with the page that runs everything?", let's talk. No strings attached, in plain language.

References

• Reportan interrupciones en Facebook e Instagram, según redes de usuarios — CNN en Español
• Facebook e Instagram no funcionan y registran una incidencia que afecta a miles de usuarios — ElNacional.cat
• Facebook Users Experience Global Outage — Arlington Cardinal