Research and advisory company Forrester has outlined why Facebook has a “risk-management problem” and provided advice for brands that were caught up in yesterday’s outage.
In a blog post, Forrester’s analysts compared Facebook’s app ecosystem to old school Christmas lights – “where one goes out, they all go out”.
“Over the past two years, Facebook consolidated its disparate app ecosystem onto one backend infrastructure,” Forrester said.
“It’s a move that creates some operational efficiencies for the company and insulation from a potential breakup by regulators. But it also exposes Facebook to concentration risk: A single risk event that produces a cascading effect.”
And while the outage left millions of users across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp unable to connect, it also left many advertisers in the dark.
Forrester pointed to its 2021 Consumer Technographics Benchmark data, which shows Facebook’s core app continues to rank as the top-used social media platform weekly among all global audiences except China.
“Today’s Facebook outage wasn’t the first and it won’t be the last,” Forrester said.
“It’s a reminder to advertisers to have proactive mitigation plans in place to avoid the scramble of trying to figure out what to do in the moment.”
To prepare for future outages, Forrester suggested advertisers create “what if” scenarios for future outages, so that they can quickly pivot and minimise the impact on demand gen activity.
The outage should also serve as a reminder of the importance of diversifying media spend.
“Brands should use this incident to (re)assess how much of their ad spend is concentrated in a single media platform and determine a go-forward diversification strategy that still reaches their target audiences while reducing concentration risk,” Forrester said.
