If you use Instagram regularly and tried to access the site on Saturday, chances are you experienced the same panic, confusion, frustration, and anger that the rest of us did. OK, I exaggerate slightly. But slight panic attacks were definitely experienced!

There were many a joke made about Coachella crashing Instagram, and whether or not that's true, the site did go down for a few hours on Saturday.

Of course, we didn't know it was down at first. Some people thought their accounts had been hacked. Some people (ahem, me) started cursing out their wifi for a slow connection. Some people repeatedly tried to keep refreshing their feeds. Some people just exited the app and thought nothing more of it.

But as it stayed down, the complaints on Twitter ran rampant. How dare they not fix this immediately! They need to fix their shiz now! People were straight up pissed off. To be fair, I was upset too, but I was actually trying to get work done.

Inevitably, every social media site has gone down at some point. Remember when Gmail (and other Google services) went down for a short period of time in January? You'd have thought the sky was falling! We all remember the Twitter fail whale and the panic that would follow its appearance. Or when Ellen broke Twitter with her epic Oscar's selfie. And how many times has Facebook loaded a blank screen for you?

It's just reality. Sooner or later, all sites will crash at some point. So, Saturday Instagram crashed.

What do you do when Instagram goes down? Do you freak out? Do you even care?

I know it's not necessarily the biggest deal, but when social media sites go down, I recommend you have a plan. If you have posts planned for that day, prepare the posts and keep them on the ready for when the site returns to normal. Then upload as planned, just a little later than originally planned.

If you were planning to offer a promotion or discount and your time was jeopardized by the outage, find a fun way to incorporate the glitch into a new promotion. Run the promo again the next day or soon after and include a bonus discount or rename it, playing off the theme of the Instagram outage.

This is also where I importantly remind you to have your fans on more than one social media site. If your fans are following you on multiple sites, you can keep them up to speed by switching to an alternate site.

Maybe you run your promo on Twitter or Google+ in the absence of Instagram. Also make sure you are communicating the status of your Instagram events or promos on the other sites so that fans can stay abreast of progress.

This leads me to a side note.... I am always one for honesty. And as much as I love Instagram, I have to admit that I was disappointed in how they handled their outage on Saturday.

Instagram was obviously down and people were flocking to Twitter to complain about it. It took Instagram over an hour to update their Twitter account with a simple statement acknowledging the issue. They didn't post anything on Facebook. They didn't post anything on their blog.

There were no updates on Twitter throughout the day. There were no apologies. And then, when things were restored they deleted the original tweet acknowledging the issue! Yes, they tried to remove any proof that it happened at all.

This is no way to handle social media for anyone, especially a social media giant like Instagram.

But I've digressed... I'd love to hear from you. How did you handle it when Instagram went down?