The Facebook Outage Today Reached Far and Wide

Today was a comparatively slower news day than yesterday, so only a few items for you:

YIKES: A Major Facebook Outage

The big news — a massive outage of the Facebook platform earlier today.

It didn’t last long, but it affected a whole lot.

For our purposes as digital marketers, the ads platform was down for more than an hour.

Here at our agency, we’re pretty sure it actually rolled back some changes we’d made to a client’s ad. So if you’ve made some changes too recently, maybe go in and check it.

Likewise, Instagram and WhatsApp were down.

WhatsApp couldn’t connect to the server and messages weren’t being delivered. 

It wasn’t clear at our deadline whether this also affected messaging on Facebook and Instagram — given that those three platforms started using a single messaging foundation last year.

Instagram’s feed was barfing up a server error. You couldn’t add Instagram as a placement on your campaigns, if you could even get to the ads manager at all.

It looks like things are back to normal, but definitely double-check any ad campaigns you have running.

David Herrmann has the only true comment about the whole thing…

Facebook Retires Watch Party

Facebook has decided to retire Watch Party — the miserably confusing dog’s breakfast of a feature which nobody really understood.

It theory, it was supposed to let you watch videos with your friends.

In practice, though, you’d go to watch something on your stream, that would accidentally create a Watch Party that would invite your friends, and they’d pile in saying “What is this? What’s going on?”

There was really no practical use for it in digital marketing, and they never added ad products to it, like mid-rolls.

Mercifully, they’ll be dropping it on April 16th.

If you care, you can download a copy of your posts, comments and reactions using the Download Your Information tool.

YouTube Adds Realtime Subscriber Counts

One of the things about growing my TikTok channel that I didn’t expect was that I’m obsessively checking my follower count. It’s around 5800 right now, thanks for asking.

(This isn’t my usual behaviour, but the growth on TikTok can go so fast — how can you not check all the time!)

Anyway, if this describes you too and you have a YouTube channel, you can now see many people have subscribed with a new counter that updates in real-time.

Until now, if you wanted near real-time numbers, you needed to rely on third-party tools.

But now, there’s a section called “See Live Count” in the Real-Time card within YouTube Studio’s Analytics.

And remember, friends, your subscriber count is not a reflection of your value as a human being.

At least that’s what I’m told.

Flotsam and Jetsam

Three small items to wrap up the week:

• Instagram is testing a new option that would highlight when feed posts have been re-shared to Stories.

• Twitter is planning to let you add custom visual backgrounds when re-sharing a tweet as a Fleet

• Reports say Instagram is working on a separate version of the app for users under 13.

Finally...

Those of you who’ve been regular listeners to the podcast, or subscribers to this newsletter, will know that this has been quite the month for my wife and I.

Our cat Pepper died earlier this month, and while we did celebrate our wedding anniversary this week, we did it in our local hospital’s ER because we thought my wife had broken her leg.

So, suffice to say, we need a vacation. 

We’re not going far — public health guidelines and all — but we are taking some of next week off. 

This means no podcast or newsletter this coming Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday.

That said, I will be doing some updates on my TikTok account, so now would be a good time to follow it — my username there is @DigitalMarketingSecrets. I also do a 60-second version of each day’s newsletter and podcast now every day there too.

Okay, see you on Thursday.