Your friend and family members suffered withdrawal symptoms, personal messaging was delayed, and maybe your business operations were even interrupted. What happened to Facebook this past Monday? For that matter, what happened to quite a few of your favorite websites?

On Monday, October 4, Facebook and all of its associated apps (like Instagram) crashed for most of the afternoon. While the resulting memes were pretty amusing, a lot of people were left wondering how the social media giant could be completely knocked offline. Could it happen again in the future? Could it be even worse next time? And if Facebook could suffer such a calamity, isn’t any website vulnerable?

Luckily, the experts have reassured us that Facebook was not the target of cyberattack. This time, at least, you don’t have to worry that your personal data was stolen from your social media account. And the outage was not the result of any sort of digital terrorism.

As it turns out, the outage was a result of a simple misconfiguration within Facebook’s system. Due to random human error, the platform and all of its associated apps were simply unable to connect to the world wide web.

But still, the episode was alarming. We all share an incredible amount of information on Facebook and other social media apps, and seeing it all come crashing down served as a harsh dose of reality. Yes, at any time the digital systems upon which we rely could fail – even something as massive and powerful as Facebook!

So allow this situation remind you of important social media security principles:

  • Establish two-factor authentication for your Facebook account, especially if you run a business page.
  • Choose a strong password, composed of a random series of characters and symbols.
  • Store your password in a secure location.
  • Only allow employees to access the company’s social media account on a need-to-know basis, and make sure they are well versed in proper security protocol.
  • Avoid storing credit card numbers and other sensitive personal information within your browser or social media accounts.
  • Be extremely careful about what you share online, always.

And of course, give us a call at 888-RING-MY-TECH if you have any other internet security questions. We can help to reassure you in the event of large outages, and troubleshoot your systems and methods to be sure you’re using best practices.