As probably everyone knows, Facebook and Instagram went down on Monday for a very long time. And considering I work with social media in my day job, it was a really tough day for me. Most of the questions clients had were only able to be answered by saying that we were sorry but we could not look that up at this time as Instagram is currently down. It was a very frustrating day, but I’m glad that the system was back up during my work day so I could get to my work before I was done. And by some miracle, I was able to prep things during the outage enough that I could push through and get almost all my work done by the end of the day. I didn’t get everything done, but everything that had to be done that day was completed.
I know that the issues I had with the outage weren’t as bad as what other people dealt with, but it was a lot of stress when I was already under a lot of stress for other reasons. And in a way, it was good because I figured out some new ways to organize my work. Hopefully I won’t need to use those ideas during an outage in the future, but it is nice that I was able to be creative in the middle of so much frustration.
While work was frustrating during the outage, the other issue I had was not being able to communicate with some of my friends. I have a Facebook message group with some of the women who are in Movie Club with me. We just message each other a lot of random things throughout the day. Sometimes it’s getting support for tough stuff and sometimes we are sending each other TikToks we like or things we find funny. But since it was done through Facebook, we couldn’t message during the outage.
So as soon as I was able to message my group again, I said we should find a way to get off of Facebook to make sure this doesn’t happen again. The only issue is that not everyone in the group lives in the United States. But fortunately, we are all Apple users, so we can use iMessage with no issues with international texting! So we got a regular text group set up and have been using that this week.
I have talked about Movie Club and the women in that group several times before, but I still find it so interesting that I have bonded with people that I have never met in person. But it also somehow makes so much sense. And I feel like where there are tough or negative things going on in the world, that’s when our group comes together. We really bonded at the start of the pandemic when we started Movie Club. That never would have happened without a pandemic. And Movie Club really helped to keep me sane during such a crazy time.
And even though it wasn’t bad messaging through Facebook, an outage got us to exchange real phone numbers so we can text and it’s a bit easier for all of us to do that instead of using Facebook. Somehow, texting makes the friendship that we’ve all created seem more real. And that made me happy during a really crazy day.
It’s nice to know that some good things came out of a social media outage and the frustration I was having that day. And the good things that happened put me in a much better mood when I was able to work again. And I guess I’m more prepared now with how to deal with this if it happens again. But I hope it doesn’t!
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