The tooth extraction did not go as planned. It involved one dentist, two oral surgeons, a Google My Business listing, and three appointments in as many days. I’ve never been so happy to bid a piece of me adieu. In the middle of all that Facebook and Instagram ceased to exist for 6 hours. Needless to say, the week was a bit of a blur and I’m pleased to be perched on my kitchen stool, overlooking the articles for this post, with mere hours between me and my weekend.
The Great Facebook Crash of 2021 was pretty epic in it’s spectacular level of failure and deserves some discussion here. Alongside that I bring to you more sad news for Google’s FLoC’s and an interesting use case of AI by MailChimp.
FACEBOOK OUT
On Monday, as I patiently waited for my first attempted tooth extraction appointment to begin, we were already 4 hours into the Facebook and Instagram crash. 4 hours spent wondering what was going on, listening to the conspiracy theories that it was a purposeful action, refreshing my feed, and panicking a little about what impact it would have on our marketing efforts and data collection. We had to stop sending information via CAPI to Facebook while it was down because it was affecting Homefiniti websites.
One hour and 15 minutes after the extraction attempt began, I was released, with half a tooth still in my mouth and the promise of a successful second attempt to be carried out on Tuesday. Facebook and Instagram were still down. They didn’t resurface for another 45 minutes.
A full 6 hours of unprecedented downtime and this is the answer we got from Facebook about what happened. Essentially they threw away their address and the internet was no longer able to find them. But not only couldn’t the internet find them, Facebook couldn’t reach out to let them know what had happened because when they threw their address away they also threw away their only form of communication with the internet. Oops. And I thought my Monday was terrible.
So when digital marketers all over the world go to look at their Facebook ads data for this week or this month, there will now be a 6 hour hole in the middle of it all. Just like the hole that now resides in my mouth.
GET THE FLOC OUT
Turns out my mouth and Facebook weren’t the only ones to have a bad week. Google announced that it was further delaying the release of FLoC’s from Q4 2021 to Q1 2022. If you’ll recall, FLoC’s are supposed to be Google’s answer to third party cookies. But it hasn’t been well received so far. Their success or failure will have an impact on when Google phases out cookies so this delay is one to take note of.
MAILCHIMP
I’m ending the news on a positive note. MailChimp, a platform that I love, is expanding it’s AI offerings and will now help optimize emails using all the data it has collected over the years. Over time Mailchimp has incorporated many features that help to make marketing easier for small and mid-sized businesses. This latest move is pretty cool and helps to make the task of generating email content slightly less daunting for those that aren’t fully proficient in email.
Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend!
