This morning while writing about a few new applications on Facebook, I realized that the applications I was writing about were no longer working. That’s a normal occurrence if you test out as many applications as I do. I thought that one of the applications had crashed thanks to the Techcrunch effect but apparently I was wrong.

No application appears to be working currently. I’ve seen bugs in the platform and most of them have taken place at night. Occasionally, Facebook has had minor glitches and as a recent report found, Facebook has surprisingly poor performance on a regular basis. Still though, I haven’t seen the Facebook platform go down in the middle of the day. So far the platform has been down for about 15 minutes. Any crash that lasts this long is not a good sign.

Facebook: push your changes live in the middle of the night when people are sleeping! I will send out a message to Facebook’s communications department to see what’s going on but as of now there are no signs of what the issue may be. I checked the platform status feed and there are no postings yet by Facebook. The developer forum is highly active and there is now lots of buzz about applications not working. Hopefully Facebook can fix this soon because it is costing thousands of developers money.

Most hosting companies will provide you with a 99.999% uptime guarantee. Facebook won’t provide you with anything except the opportunity to access their more than 60 million users. Uptime is a luxury not a right on social platforms.