Facebook Should Reveal Reasons Behind Outages, Insists Social Media Analyst

Social networking companies Facebook and Instagram should be proactive in informing ts many users about the causes of its outage problems, insists Augusto Beato, a social media analyst of Portland SEO.

“The information would help businesses prepare for similar issues,” emphasizes Beato, who may be reached via the Portland SEO website. "There were global complaints about the problem as businesses have treated these social networks as business partners and would suffer every time there is a service interruption."

Beato expressed his concern after social media networks Facebook and Instagram, as well as WhatsApp, the messaging service that Facebook owns, experienced a second outage in a month last Sunday, this time lasting for three hours. A Facebook spokesman did not elaborate about the cause, and only apologized for the "inconvenience."

Big and small businesses have increasingly relied on Facebook, Instagram and other social media sites to connect with customers, sell their goods, and promote their brands.

Instagram is now one of the preferred social media portals for selling merchandise and create brand recall.

Downdetector.com reported that there were over 12,000 reports of issues while Facebook was at its peak. There were also 7,000 incidents with Instagram and another 3,000 with WhatsApp. The reports came mainly from the Philippines, Nepal Ukraine, Greece, and Morocco.

The downtime was from 11:30 to 14:50 BST, before Facebook was able to resolve the connection issues.

Facebook had an outage of over 24 hours last month, which is its longest ever.

In 2008, when a severe disruption was experienced, Facebook said that it was due to 'server configuration change'.