Facebook Lock Outs; Why You Should Communicate With Your Customers

Social Media

Starting last week, as Business Insider reports, lots of users, including us, were/are getting temporarily locked out of their Facebook accounts. You could be trying to access a page or post, see the following message, and just get redirected home. Or, you might just get the message and not be able to do anything with your account. All of these things were happening to us on June 6th.

It’s happened to so many users that the hashtag #FacebookDown became active again on Twitter. There are currently messages in a few different languages from more than a few users.

We don’t have to explain that this makes Facebook look bad, especially when people jump on a competitor’s social network to complain. It’s also not the end of the world for any of the social networks, even Facebook, to be down for a few hours, or even a day because most people have no problem with a reason to do something else for a while.

The problem with this entire situation is that Facebook has been silent. They are not active in the Twitter conversation. They haven’t yet responded when Business Insider reached out for comment. In the world of social media, instant gratification is the name of the game. You need to control the conversation as much as possible, and that means someone has to be monitoring the situation.

Forget for a second that the service is non-functional. If Facebook had published a post that everyone could see, or sent one message on Twitter, or reached out to one of the countless journalists they know just to let someone, anyone know that the application was having issues and they were looking into it, this wouldn’t be a big deal.

Communicate with your customers, especially on social media. People will generally be understanding… as long as you keep them up to date on what’s going on.