This past weekend while most of us were enjoying the lovely weather in Austin, a number of Facebook users were experiencing issues Saturday. Users that were effected were unable to login, upload pictures, and experienced slow connections. The United States experienced the most problems, but other countries including the United Kingdom, Thailand, and Mexico had difficulties with the site.
Those that were upset took out their frustration on Twitter.
One upset user wrote “I mean, come on! Don’t waste my time-wasting time!”
Another later in the day tweeted "Facebook account is disabled for reasons not explained to me. :( ."
As a result, upset users were successful in creating a twitter storm for the social media site. Facebook responded to the complaints by issuing a tweet
Some people are having trouble accessing Facebook and site features because of an isolated server issue. We are working to fix this ASAP.12:35 PM Feb 20th from web
Fortunately for myself, I was not one of these people that experienced problems, but I did notice Facebook as a trending topic on my home page.
Several media sites have reported that there were isolated server problems, which led to only a small percentage of users experiencing problems. With close to 400 million users, a small percentage is still a large number of upset facebookers.
By Saturday afternoon the problem was fixed and Facebook users rejoiced everywhere, because their favorite time-wasting website was glitch free.
I think it’s interesting how when one social media outlet isn’t working, (facebook) there is always another one to the rescue (twitter). I know that isn’t what you’re post is about, but I think it shows how unbelievably attached we are to social media. Or rather, we have become attached with its ability to let us communicate so quickly with so many people. The fact that facebook wasn’t working properly, led its users to complain about it on twitter. Obviously, these complaints weren’t useless, because that then led to a “twitter storm” as you explained. I also really like the tweet you posted, “Don’t waste my time-wasting time” it’s so true! Even our time wasting time is precious to us, and when someone or something gets in the way of that, we tend to freak out a little. Your post also solidifies the fact that consumers now play a much bigger role in things than they used to. But now that we can status update and tweet away all of our complaints, companies have to be careful about what they do and make sure they don’t upset any customers. This instance is a great example of this because as you showed, facebook responded to the complaints with their own tweet. This has been the case with other companies who’ve had to deal with twitter storms such as these. And it only strengthens the fact that the rise of social media has led to an inheritance of power on our part.
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