Comment by ghostoftiber
5 years ago
Incidentally the facebook app itself really handled this gracefully. When the app can't connect to facebook, it displays "updates" from a pool of cached content. It looks and feels like facebook is there, but we know it's not. I didn't notice this until the outage and I thought it was neat.
WhatsApp failed similarly, but I thought it was a poor design decision to do so. Anyone waiting on communication through WhatsApp had no indication (outside the media) that it was unavailable, and that they should find a nother communication channel.
Don't paper connectivity failures. It disempowers users
I think these features are designed for the timescales like "between subway stations which have cell service" or even "driving into a tunnel". In those cases, it seems totally appropriate to me.
whatsapp used to have a "status" page in their app, they removed it years ago though.
That said - yeah, i figured there's an issue when hard refreshing whatsapp web (sometimes has a kink that needs to be refreshed away) didn't work.
I’m curious if the app handled posts or likes gracefully too. Did it accept and cache the updates until it could reconnect to Facebook servers?
I'm not a huge facebook user and I mostly use it to keep in touch with my parents. I did notice that trying to message them resulted in "message not delivered" (which gave me a prompt to retry) but I didn't try to post anything during the outage.
On Instagram I was even able to "like" posts while the outage was in effect. Not sure if the app replayed those when the service came back.
I suspect so. From the app's point of view it's likely not terribly different to losing cell service for a while.