Yesterday there was an unexpected Facebook outage, leaving many users staring at a blank page – there was no error message nor explanation, just a white screen. While a not inconsiderable amount of people (notably employers) would greet a respite from Facebook as an absolute godsend, for a the majority who tried in vain to access their photos, messages, updates etc., it must have been one of those heart in mouth moments… “Did Anonymous actually go ahead and do it? Have all of my pictures gone forever?”
The truth is that Facebook was back up in a matter of minutes, but that didn’t stop people turning to the next mass-audience soapbox from which they could make their voices heard in the interim: Twitter. A lot of people cracked gags about spikes in productivity and the inevitable slew of tech blog posts (OK, I guess I’d be included in that stereotype), while others poked fun about ‘the horror’ of not being able to see a news feed full of baby pictures, Instagrams of food and links to YouTube videos.
In fairness, while a lot of what gets posted on Facebook could be regarded as junk, one man’s trash in another man’s treasure. All of these posts and photos clearly mean something to the person who posted them, or to the person whose Timeline it was posted to.
So while it’s fun to point out how much time people ‘waste’ on Facebook, it only becomes a waste if we have nothing to show for it in the future.
If you are concerned about losing any of your Facebook content – and lets face it, nothing in the cloud is 100% safe – then you can back up a copy of your Facebook account to your own PC/Mac with SocialSafe. In the eventuality of a Facebook meltdown, you can still browse or search through your photos, wall posts, updates, friends, messages and more using your SocialSafe journal. So look after all your yesterdays, today, and you’ll be enjoying them tomorrow.