Photo by Oladimeji Ajegbile from Pexels
On the 2nd of September, the Insta villagers revolted. Ok, that’s a bit dramatic, but Instagrammers did voice their outcry when the platform was not refreshing posts, was “down” or “compromised”.
Social media for some freelancers and business owners is indispensable, especially if it is the main platform for promoting or selling their products or services. But when one of their social media platforms goes down, or they lose their internet connection, so too does their ability to connect with followers and customers. Is it time for social media savvy freelancers to go old school and find new ways to engage their audience?
Instagram problems in the last 24 hours (the techy bit)
The following chart shows the number of reports that we have received about Instagram by time of day over the past 24 hours. An outage is determined when the number of reports are higher than the baseline, represented by the red line.
Small business owners respond to the shock horror of the Instagram outage
Craig Bunting, Co-founder at BEAR, a coffee and specialist drinks experience retailer relays his experience when he first leant that of the Instagram outage:
“An outage on the day I ventured from the safety of the Midlands to central London! I stood, lost, with no one influencing where I eat or drink. Then I looked up, and there was a whole world outside of my phone, in front of me to simply explore. It was life, but not as most of us now know it.”
Kate Allen, Owner at Salcombe Finest, a luxury holiday home and concierge service, was scrambled when she couldn’t resell cancelled holidays to new customers.
“I’m an utterly outraged Mother Hen. With 11k followers, we had in our clutches a golden egg. Sadly our cunning plan to use Instagram to resell cancelled holidays at the last minute has been scrambled. Anyone fancy a holiday in Salcombe? I’ll throw in some quails eggs…”
Lewis Shaw, Founder & Mortgage Expert at Shaw Financial Services is still trying to locate his swagger…
“As a mortgage broker who likes to strut my stuff, an Insta outage is like losing my dancing limbs! Not to mention I lost valuable meme time and ended up having to actually talk to someone! Come on Zuck – get it sorted.”
Victoria Vickery, Founder & Managing Director at All Star Marketing Club, like Kate Allen, also referred to the eggs adage in her Instagram outage, but she got to the core of the problem for business owners: over-reliance on social media.
“While Instagram is now a great platform for winning new business, especially for small and micro business owners, you can’t just rely on social media. If businesses have been impacted by the Instagram outage then, quite simply, they don’t have a good enough marketing system in place, and have their eggs in too few baskets.”
If you cannot pull yourself from your mobile phone or laptop to get to the bottom of the Insta-outage, then join others over at Downdetector. Some of them seem to have called upon thrid parties to fix the problem: Instagram outage and reported problems map | Downdetector
How did you pivot your Instagram outage? We just had to use “pivot” while it was still 2021.
