On Tuesday, March 5th, Facebook, Instagram and Google Ads experienced widespread outages that lasted for nearly two hours, affecting thousands of users worldwide. More than 550,000 reports poured in from Facebook users, and Instagram received 92,000 similar complaints, as reported by Reuters.

As Meta stated on their newest platform, Threads: ”Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

Interestingly, the issues coincided with login problems on Google’s platform as well, which caused many users to believe the incidents were somehow connected.

The disruption of Meta services was caused by issues at the company’s admin center. As it’s common for many to use Facebook as a way to log in to third-party services, the issue cascaded to other websites, causing more users to report problems. 

Google Ads reported issues with their Ad Manager beginning at around the same time as Meta’s incident. They quickly started investigating the reports, but thankfully for Google, the hiccups were far more contained than the issues at Meta.. Nevertheless, it affected many business customers, including The Guardian, who also reported on the issue.

The solution was complicated, as the engineers were not able to access their own servers remotely and fix the problems. They also weren’t able to get through the electronic locks to gain physical access.

What losses were there for businesses?

As expected, Meta closed in the red with a -7.97 point loss on the Nasdaq, causing a loss of over 2.79 billion dollars for the founder, chairman, and CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg. 

While this massive monetary loss certainly put a damper on Meta’s day, the most pressing concern Meta is facing is the hundreds of thousands of angry users and businesses who were trying to access the platform, or running ads that were completely inaccessible. 

This real-life example is similar to the misstep of allocating a large portion of your budget to running ads on your landing page, only to discover that your page is down, and possibly has been for some time.

This is where the importance of having a simple uptime monitoring service comes into play.

Having monitors set up to detect downtime acts as a safeguard, quickly alerting you to any issues that arise, allowing your team to work quickly to solve the problem, and saving both money and your brand’s reputation.

Setting up a lifetime FREE uptime monitoring takes just  30 seconds and there are no hidden strings or terms.

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No matter what the reasons for website downtime may be, downtime causes ripple effects that can waste time, money, and provoke the ire of your website’s users.

Downtime can be tricky to calculate – a simple way to figure out direct costs is to divide your average hourly revenue by 60, then multiply that number by the total number of minutes of downtime.

As for evaluating the more elusive hidden costs of downtime? Those are much harder to gauge and vary widely with each and every incident.

Time will tell what the true cost of March 5th’s outages will be for Meta and Google, but it is clear that these types of disruptions underscore the vital roles of solid infrastructure, crisis management, and a top-notch uptime monitoring service play in maintaining business continuity and customer trust.