Facebook Down And Why I Like To Have My Personal Data With Me

Here's an anecdote of something that recently happened to me which has some interesting insights into what's currently happening in mobile: During the day I got a call from a friend calling me in my role as a tech- and mobile-savy person. He tells me that he is somewhere in a city because he has an appointment at a certain place with someone he communicated over Facebook. He thought he could remember the address from the top of his head, and, if not, just look it up in Facebook. Wrong on both accounts. Having arrived, the memory of the street number was gone and just in this very instant, Facebook was down as well. Is there anything I could do he asked me?

I quickly checked Facebook and saw that the message stream was also down for me. Nothing you can do I told him, the data you need is in the cloud and won't come out for now. Sorry. So I recommended to go to a street corner café and wait till either the memory or the cloud returns. Eventually, the memory returned. So much relying on online services. Agreed, the exchange of data had to go through the cloud in this case but leaving the critical pieces of information there and then relying on it is a dangerous thing. And that's one reason why I like to have my personal data with me.