There were situations in the recent past where one social media outlet was taken off the air, due to servers shutting down or a possible hacking attack. But having three very popular social platforms shut down at once for such a long time, created a big buzz online. Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went down for several hours and it seems the entire world was shocked. And as a result, people reacted quickly by posting and commenting about the topic, and creating a lot of memes.
The Affogata platform, which tracks trends and popular topic discussions from many different customers’ feedback points, recorded some huge peaks yesterday in people’s reactions to the outage. Facebook mentions, for example, which averaged 1,400 on the seven days leading to yesterday, jumped to 44,138 comments across all platforms. Similarly, WhatsApp increased from 800 mentions daily to almost 58,000 comments elsewhere, with Twitter leading the way with 32,000 feedbacks here. Instagram peaked with 36,736 reactions, up from the previous recent daily average of just 1,500. Moreover, The hashtags facebookdown and facebookisdown had 65,433 mentions on Twitter, reminding us how quickly something becomes viral on the open web.
Brand sentiment, another important feature which the Affogata platform tracks and analyses regularly, also turned for the worse, as can be expected, for the three social media giants. Negative conversations about Facebook amounted to 6% of all mentions, three times more than the positive ones. WhatsApp drew 3% negative sentiments versus 1.4% positive reactions, a more than 2-1 bad ratio. Finally, negative mentions for Instagram accumulated to 4% out of all discussions against only 2% positive ones. The tide has definitely turned in the wrong direction for the three brands and within only hours.
It will be interesting to follow the next days’ brand situations for those companies, all falling under the Facebook umbrella, and see how and if they recover from this crisis. There are those who view the situation as a small “bump in the road” since all services returned to normal operations already. Then there are the social and psychological discussions regarding the great presence that those three apps fill in many of our daily lives.
The addiction of many of us to social media took an unexpected pause yesterday. Some of us took comfort in this surprise break while others celebrated and shared their thoughts on the channels not suffering from the outage.
It seems that the discussion on “How these social media giants” took over our lives could be the next hot “topic of the day”. Affogata will be there too, to track and analyze the fallout from the situation.