Good morning, Marketer, and there are rumors circulating… Specifically, that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — which at the time of writing are all suffering an outage — might be down for at least a week. Rumors, I say, not informed speculation. After all, if the root cause is a DNS failure, as Cisco has suggested, that’s a familiar fault that should be resolvable. And of course, there are people too saying they’re gone for good, or that they should be gone for good (especially after the whistleblower allegations on “60 Minutes” on Sunday). To which someone on Twitter responded, forlornly, “I need them to run my business.” The commercial and emotional dependence on these platforms highlighted by their temporary unavailability makes me think again: What if the internet itself went away? For a day, a week, indefinitely? How would anything work anymore? Kim Davis Editorial Director |