Facebook outage and the dangers of having all your eggs in Zuckerberg's basket

Facebook and Instagram both went down for 40 minutes this morning. The problem started around 1am ET [6am GMT]. Hacking group Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility, although Facebook has intimated that the outage was caused by an upgrade performed by their engineers, which was later rolled back.

While the problem caused the inevitable memes, fun-poking and social media suggestions that people would have to live in the real world for a little while, there were bigger things at stake for businesses that have aligned themselves closely with Facebook.

Many e-commerce and e-business websites use Facebook as a log-in mechanism. Indeed, on some sites it is the only log-in option. During today's outage, websites that rely on Facebook's infrastructure were rendered absolutely useless.
Some sites were offline completely, while others that use Facebook for authentication found that customers were unable to log-in, buy, post or do whatever it is they usually do on the site.

The saving grace is that the outage happened off-peak, which meant that the impact wasn't as great as it might have been during business hours, but it should serve as a warning.

To use the appropriate parlance, if our website was dependent on a relationship with Facebook to maintain business, this morning we'd be changing the relationship status to "it's complicated".

How to make sure your business isn't offline when Facebook is offline

• Offer more than one registration, log-in and authentication option. The same applies to Twitter and Google+ as it does to Facebook: making access to your site dependent on a website over which you have no control is dangerous.

• Use native registration. There is nothing wrong with a good, old-fashioned email and password sign-up in addition to third-party authentication. These continue to work even if one of the other options is broken.

• Monitor all log-in options. Make sure you or your hosting company is notified if a log-in option fails for any reason.

• Have a contingency plan. This will happen again at some point, so have your alternative plans in place. For sites heavily reliant on Facebook, this might involve a 'Facebook log-in broken, please sign in with your email address' message. That would avoid frustration for users and missed sales for your business.

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