5 Reasons It’s Time to “Unlike” Social Media for Risk Management

An article from Security Magazine

For many organizations, it was déjà vu this March. Meta’s platforms Facebook and Instagram experienced outages on Tuesday, March 5th that lasted approximately two hours, coinciding with Super Tuesday voting in 16 states. And today, LinkedIn experienced an outage impacting thousands of users around the globe.

It’s not the first time outages of this magnitude have happened. In 2021, Facebook experienced a massive outage across all three of its platforms for six hours and was out for more than 14 hours back in 2019.

More than 3.5 billion people use Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, and more than 200 million businesses use Facebook tools to communicate with their customers. Social media platforms are the primary means of both receiving information and communicating for many organizations, and these outages can have a profoundly negative impact, both financially and in terms of reputation.

Beyond the monetary and reputational consequences, the bigger question companies should be asking themselves is: “What would we have done if an emergency had happened during the outage?” This question has become even more urgent as the risk landscape continues to become more complex. Severe weather events are happening more frequently, cyber attacks are on the rise and civil unrest disturbances are in the news all too often.

If you’re relying on social media platforms to communicate with your stakeholders during critical events, the massive Facebook outage is a definite wake-up call that social media isn’t a reliable or effective tool for business operations. We’ve got a long list of reasons why – and we have some information to share about a better platform when it comes to crisis communications.

Photo by Stockcake.com