Local businesses react to Monday’s Facebook outage

BOWLING GREEN Ky.- Social media users were frustrated Monday after Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp had a severe outage lasting not minutes, but hours. As of Tuesday, the situation has resolved. Some users considered the moment as a slight annoyance, while business owners who rely on the social media platform were wondering what would happen if it didn’t come back. Organizations like the Bowling Green Rock Band Academy use Facebook to conduct virtual lessons among other things.

“I’m like, yeah surely in the next 15 minutes or maybe 20 minutes, it’ll come back. But then an hour goes by and I’m like okay, this isn’t normal. What’s going on here? After time goes on, I started to get a little more antsy about it. If we don’t have Facebook, what are we going to do,” said Rock Band Academy instructor Matt Devore.

Specialty Running store and running therapy spot ‘The Runner’s Lounge’ owner Patrick Folker also uses Facebook for communication and promotional means, and Monday’s outage put a halt to his usual methods.

“At first, it was kind of an annoyance, but then as time went on, I couldn’t reach out to my customers, and my customers couldn’t reach out to me. Not only could I not contact current customers, but I also couldn’t gain new customers,” Folker said.

At the time, Twitter was the only mainline social media platform still in action, though Folker says it wasn’t a perfect fix to the dilemma.

“I basically had to dust off my Twitter account and went to Twitter, but I don’t know how much good that would do in just one day,” Folker said.

Devore says while he’s thankful Facebook is currently back up and running, there’s a lesson to be learned.

“As nerve wracking as it was at the beginning because we do manage so much through Facebook, It was also an awakening that there’s a way out there. Look for other means of communication,” Devore said.

And that’s exactly what business owners are doing to be prepared in case this happens again.

“I don’t have any other venues in line to get the word out, so that’s what we’ll be doing today is checking other venues. It’s not like the old days where we have the yellow pages.