I monitored the Facebook amateur radio club’s repeater during the outage to see if they utilized it in any capacity like that. I didn’t hear it used that way.
That said, I don't know what's so wrong with telephones.
Do you have all your coworkers' personal phone numbers?
My manager has my phone number, as does HR, and I imagine this is a standard situation at nearly every company.
The point was to make sure that, even if all of our infra including third-party IP comms and chat providers was hard down, we'd still be able to talk to one another and figure out what to do about it.
For an organization on Facebook's scale to overlook something so fundamental implies lots of things about the collective blind spots of its engineering and operational culture. None of those things make me less glad I so assiduously avoid even using any of its products, to say nothing of relying on them - at least to the extent that I'm able to avoid it, given their apparent ability to break half the anglophone Internet more or less at whim.
Mostly I was hoping to hear some amateur enthusiasm gloating about invisible light resilience.
Where I live there is a General Motors amateur radio club. The club is not owned or run by GM, but GM sponsors it by allowing repeater equipment on top of their building, and presumably monetary and other donations over the decade. Many of the members are current and former GM employees but you don't have to be affiliated with GM in any way (or even have an amateur radio license) in order to join.
There are lots of amateur radio clubs associated with a company for sponsorship/community outreach reasons, I assume the Facebook one is the same. (And I have to assume because they don't seem to have a website that I could find.)
To reply to another comment in this thread, you can break nearly all FCC rules if you need help in a life-threatening situation. Facebook being down was NOT a life-threatening event as defined by the FCC, even if their services being unavailable indirectly lead to loss of life.
https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=1a361a6eb3d1594e6a...