When FB shuts the door

The night of October 4 was what a modern apocalypse may look like. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were all down, leaving creators, influencers, brands, and aam junta scrambling, panicking with ‘useless' phones in their hand. As 2.7 billion social network users were left empty handed, messaging app Telegram was downloaded at break neck speed (70 million on the day), along with Signal. Many of the 2.7 billion flocked to Twitter, whose official handle proudly tweeted: "Hello literally everyone"; that post got 2.4 million likes. The three social media platforms that sunk into darkness also used the microblogging site to offer updates, along with thousands of meme creators who went crazy making jokes.

For India, the outage happened at around 9 pm, when the country was winding down. But in the Western world, the day was just beginning, and it was looking like they were staring at six hours of uncertainty. Santosh Janardhan, VP, Engineering and Infrastructure, Facebook, explained in a blog post, "To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today's outage across our platforms. We've been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running. The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem."

Sameena Abedi says that without Facebook, and WhatsApp, her small business of selling plants will go kaput. She is now planning to invest in a website; (right) Varun Mayya founded Scenes, a community platform site, which he says is the future of creation, where you don't depend on a platform, but your own community

The apps finally spluttered back to life after six long hours. But the question remains: If Mark Zuckerberg lost $6 billion in that period, how much would brands that use these platforms to sell their wares, and creators, have lost?

For YouTube creator, podcaster and all-round influencer, Ranveer Allahbadia (also known as Beer Biceps), the outage didn't mean much, because he is on every possible platform. "I had started on YouTube, but at the beginning of the Coronavirus lockdown, I got on to all platforms. Every content creator should have an offline business - maybe like an actual business. For example, I run a talent management company, and I am designing an app because I have training in engineering," says the 28-year-old, who has 2.72 million subscribers on YouTube. And while he is a YouTube advocate, he does admit that becoming successful on the platform is the hardest of all. "It has no hashtags, and a video has to be packaged right. So just for that reason, I would recommend creators should also be on platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn, along with the Facebook suite of apps."

Sreya Vittaldev, Ankit Vengurlekar and Alexander Valladares

Madurai-based Madan Gowri remembers the day TikTok was banned in India on June 29, 2020. "I lost one million followers right away, and that really upset me. Like farmers live off their fields, many creators make their living on social media apps," says the 28-year-old, who has 5.45 million followers on YouTube, and makes one video a day. "No creator should be on one platform alone - I learnt that the hard way. Now, I am on YouTube and Twitter so that I can keep working no matter what." In a blog post on YouTube, when asked how does the giant platform keep outages at bay, Scott Silver, YouTube's VP of Engineering, said this: "So, we created a new system for transcoding video that lets us do this process much more efficiently at our data centres, and at warehouse scale. We decided to leverage an idea that computer scientists have been working on for years - to develop a special ‘brain' for this specific work. In other fields, there are special brains for graphics (GPUs) or artificial intelligence (TPU)."

Varun Mayya. Founder & CEO, Avalon Labs, and founder of Scenes, which is branded as the "ultimate community platform", says that it's important to diversify, and one should hedge their bets. "But the problem with being on many apps, is that it's hard to create content for every platform. It's all about producing a minimum amount of content, consistently. In that way, it's important to create your own community." Mayya feels that to avoid the "rugpull" phenomenon, creators should get on to platforms like Scenes, which help you rule the roost. "Before we started Scenes, we had almost 50,000 followers on Discord, and were generating a few crores every quarter."

Madan Gowri, who lost 1million followers after the TikTok ban, has decided he wants to be on as many platforms as possible

Sameena Abedi and Rahul Sharma, who run HeyBud, a small business that sells plants, say that she is not protected at all. "If these apps go down, my business will shut down," she says of the three-year-old business. So, right now, she is focusing on getting a physical pop-up started, and also working on a website. "For small business owners, it's always a hustle. And some things just need a physical store." Sreya Vittaldev, who works with a fintech company in Bengaluru, says that small businesses really need to invest in a website in the long run, or should at least tie up with an online selling platform like Instamojo. "They may not have the viability they want here, but it's at least a backup." Reshmi Menon, General Manager, Marketing and PR, Suta, the online saree seller that has gained a loyal following in the last few years, said, "We have always focused on a 360-degree marketing strategy and that worked in our favour as our site was up and running. As brands, it's ideal not to put all your eggs in one basket. Spread your wings. As a founder and marketer, leaving your revenue in the hands of one platform is not wise. Being active on multiple channels is the best approach in the digital age."

Impresario Handmade Restaurants, which owns the Social chain and Smoke House Deli, had started Direct Ordering during the pandemic. Even if the outage may have upset them, Alexander Valladares, Chief Marketing Officer, says that they always focused on an offline presence. "When people come over to dine, we give them takeaways, that includes a QR code, which they can scan and order from home easily." The last word could belong to Ankit Vengurlekar, managing editor, LinkedIn, who teaches podcasting and brand building at Sophia Polytechnic College. He says a good rule to follow for social media is the 60:40 rule. "Spend 60 per cent of your time on a primary platform, and the rest on a secondary one. If anything unfortunate happens, you won't have to start from scratch."