Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp all suffered historical outages last Monday for approximately 6 hours. Six long hours for B2C users whose social life stopped, six horrendous hours for companies using those platforms to run their business.
What exactly happened? Facebook engineers explained that “the company’s backbone connection between data centers shut down during routine maintenance, which caused the DNS servers to go offline”. Quite technical and this is not my point.
Reflecting on this unprecedented situation (worst outage for Facebook since 2019), or even just reading a tweet about this man who lost 1M$ “because of WhatsApp '' and who was asking “who will take responsibility for it”, made me think about why data and tools sovereignty actually matter for businesses. What is particularly striking to me is the role played by the GAFAs in these companies' lives.
At Spaycial, we believe and fight against GAFA’s dependency, providing the right tools, interface and enriched data to brands, for them to get full ownership of their strategy and revenues. Let’s just say we’re closer to a Shopify or a Zenchef than from an Amazon. We want you to know alternatives for your businesses are out there. Let’s take a deeper look.
Your business, your data, your software
GAFAs make you think their product is free when actually they’re actually making huge profits. You can’t really complain to WhatsApp for “making you lose” money when you’re taking advantage of a so-called free online tool and communication channels to manage your business. You’re the sole responsible of this situation.
I strongly believe that paying for your proper tools and interface to handle your own data is key to any company. Your business, your data, your software cannot rely on a service made available by one of the biggest companies on the planet. Sooner or later you end up paying the price of dependency.
And this happened last week, when thousands of companies lost their communication tool or cash cow, that is again in fact a third-party platform providing tools and running softwares you just don’t own.
So what should you ask yourself before using one? That the risk is big. Your data should be yours. Your teams’ work shouldn’t rely on a web platform kindly offered by one of the GAFAs. Because a 6-hour outage also suggests there was no quick fix for the issue and that your life’s work can be in jeopardy without you being able to say a word. It just stops and you’re there, waiting for hours. To end up with this Facebook PR : “To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we're sorry. The company has no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime." You lost millions, your data could be at risk, they’re sorry, case closed.
Stop being the product, own it. Sure, you’ll have to pay for it. But pay once upfront to a safe and secure third-party partner which then gives you full independence.