On September 22, Facebook went down for about two hours. Were you one of the people freaking out, or did you not even notice? Well, other than the Facebook users that have a constant connection to the "world" through Facebook, there were a few other people that were freaking out about the outage, only they saw dollar signs quickly slipping away. According to a recent article in AdvertisingAge, more than 1 million sites are currently linked to Facebook, and when Facebook has issues, these sites feel the pain as well.
All things considered, Facebook doesn't go down often (this was the first time in the past few years). However a situation like this does make you realize just how reliant other sites are on Facebook, and what could happen to these other sites when this social giant goes down. Paid advertisements are never seen, no one can use the "like" button (oh no!), users can't use Facebook Connect to comment on other websites, and for those sites that build their entire functionality on top of Facebook, they lose thousands of dollars for each minute it's down.
Should this be a major concern for websites that rely on their links with Facebook? Is it worth it to build an independent site to avoid Facebook bringing you down when it falls? The other side of that argument is that Facebook brings so much more exposure than can be achieved by an independent site. Also since Facebook rarely encounters these outages, it's not necessarily something that sites should be agonizing over. But what will happen as Facebook continues to grow and intertwine itself with another million sites. At some point will it become impossible to operate independently of Facebook? Or will sites begin to break away from Facebook and become less reliant on it's social web? It's only a matter of time before websites are forced to make this touch decision.
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