With the 2021 holiday season right around the corner and the COVID-19 pandemic still prevalent, businesses are being conducted online now more than ever. The holiday rush also comes with incidents like websites going down, slow load times, and even possible hacking attempts. While planning to tackle the sudden increase in website traffic during the festive season, businesses must have an incident response plan in place to handle unexpected outages and the consequent surge in customer inquiries.

On October 4, 2021, Facebook services went off the grid gradually, and then suddenly at 15:39 UTC. It took nearly six hours to restore service to normal. With over 3.5 billion users facing a lengthy downtime using one or multiple products from Facebook, Inc. (now known as Meta Platforms, Inc.) conversations flooded the internet about what caused the downtime issues on the American social networking service.