What the Facebook Outage Tells Us About the Threat of Micro-Outages

This week, Facebook and its subsidiaries Instagram and WhatsApp went down in an outage that lasted nearly 14 hours. Catchpoint, a user experience monitoring company, found that while the widespread outages began around 12 p.m. ET on Wednesday, they were preceded by a “micro-outage” that lasted 20 minutes. The monitoring company has noticed an increased prevalence of these types of micro-outages — which are basically website or application outages that last only a brief period of time, typically less than an hour, and occur in specific geographies. Catchpoint co-founder and CEO Mehdi Daoudi referred to them as a “very laser-focused type of issue somewhere where basically only a portion of users are impacted.”