On October 4, the whole world was impacted by yet another technical bug from the Facebook Group. This general breakdown deprived for many hours, users of Facebook, Messenger, Whatshapp and Instagram platforms. This situation has not spared the professionals of the com business. It is in this context that we offer you a mini-series of crossed words of experts on this subject. In this first episode, Seynabou DIA SALL, CEO of GLOBAL MIND CONSULTING and Alaric MOUBOUYI BOYER, Consultant in Political and Institutional Communication, give us their impressions and analysis of this situation.

Q.1 : Have you been affected in your work (internally and externally) by the worldwide computer breakdown that the Facebook Group (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp) experienced on 04/10/21? What does this situation inspire you?

Seynabou DIA SALL: We were in a strategy meeting with a client. It was only at the end of the meeting that we realized that the Facebook group was down. This situation shows us once again that structures must be prepared to work in a crisis situation. A preparation which passes by the acquisition of good communication tools (intranet, internet site, collaborative communication platform), the training of the teams to anticipate, manage any type of crisis and communicate. We must not panic and immediately think about agile methods to keep a cohesion of work, reassure the employees and keep the fluidity in the transmission of data.

Alaric MOUBOUYI BOYER: For external communication, no, because I didn’t have any publications to do at that time (afternoon). An outage during the whole morning would have been more penalizing since this is the part of the day during which we are much more active in terms of external communication. I did not really feel the effects of this bug apart from the strategic monitoring activities that are carried out at any time. We usually do our publications in the morning and early afternoon. However, the outage did have an impact on internal communication.

Q.2 : What were the repercussions on your work dynamics as well as on the treatment of your clients/collaborators’ emergencies?

Seynabou DIA SALL: Our team works remotely from the Dakar and Libreville offices. The breakdown did not have any real repercussions on the team dynamics and the treatment of customer emergencies. Our teams are trained and prepared to work in all types of situations, especially sensitive ones. This is thanks to existing guidelines, internal processes and alternative tools.

Alaric MOUBOUYI BOYER: This historical breakdown has impacted the exchange of information as well as the validation process of certain decisions concerning communication, which are essentially carried out on Whatsapp; thanks to its interactive and spontaneous nature. In this sense, these activities have been suspended and the situation has been managed in a calm manner.

Q.3 : What are the workarounds that you have deployed to advance your activities?

Seynabou DIA SALL: After having taken note of the official communiqués of these various platforms, an email was sent to the teams of the firm and to the customers by the persons in charge of the projects; with the aim of explaining the problem, to reassure them and especially to indicate the channels of communication to be privileged for the exchanges. We mainly communicated by email and Slack. For the customers for whom we ensure the digital communication, we reassured them that the digital strategy remained effective and would resume normally once the situation returned to normal. Information was relayed on the internal channels and websites of all customers.

Alaric MOUBOUYI BOYER: We used SMS to continue to communicate. However, these communications were very succinct in order to report on the positive evolution of the situation. It should be noted that SMS were not used as an alternative to the “Whatsapp tool” better adapted to our professional needs because of its interactive nature (transmission of attachments, voice messages, etc). With hindsight, it is clear that Whatsapp remains a preferred tool for work. Emails are less interactive, Telegram and Signal are hardly used within our team.

Source: Naole Media