Last week I wrote about Facebook having a tough few days. Apparently the downtime challenges have continued to plague the site as I haven’t been able to log in for most of today and uptime has been spotty over the weekend. As Facebook’s growth surges, the load on their servers continues to grow and it’s turning out to be an extremely challenging task to handle.
Facebook’s reliability has become increasingly important to me personally. Today, I’ve wanted to log in to reply to user comments, to send messages, and to find events. Unfortunately all of that has been impossible because the site won’t load beyond the login page. So how am I going to find out what event are going on in D.C. this evening? Looks like I’m going to be forced to rely on my mobile phone! How old school!
Some of my friends say that they can load the site, while others are reporting errors as well. It could also simply be that some areas of the country are having issues for one of any number of reasons. For the time being I’ll remain logged off the site but if Facebook is truly going to be a social “utility”, I’m going to need to be able to have access to it.
The iPhone application makes it possible for me to perform a lot of the activities that I’d like to on the site but unfortunately events aren’t a core component of the iPhone application yet. Guess I’ll have to find something else to do with my time since I can no longer browse around on Facebook!
Great post Nick! I actually wrote about Facebook’s decision to disable my account via AdAge today. You can read the blog post here:
http://adage.com/digitalnext/post?article_id=133896
I have had trouble also. For those of us that have paid for apps, are we going to get refunds for the time lost?
That’s a real shame you are having trouble with Facebook. It often seems to me that when Facebook has any kind of trouble, I’m the one who can’t get onto the site. That’s not been the case this time though. I was completely unaware that there were any problems - and I live in the DC area.
Good luck!
pictures won’t load, login process is interrupted, statuses won’t update… why don’t they update their users on the steps taken to fix these issues? Google or any other similarly sized commerce site would never get away with simply pretending this isn’t happening (Google keeps its users very in-the-know) so why does facebook just sit there silently when their infrastructure has been failing for days?
It is working every time for me. That is weird, I wonder what it is. Also, our app (We’re Related) is growing like crazy and haven’t noticed a hit on DAU at all. I wonder what the problem is.
BTW, Nick your Application seems to be done. The MAU and the daily growth are broken.
Anything startng with apps.facebook.com has been pretty dreadful over the last few days (posting from the south coast of England) but the core http://www.facebook.com stuff seems OK.
I’ve had issues related to logging in as well. Each time it failed to log-in I was able to enter my user name and password again and it took right off. This has been going on for about a week now.
As fast as Facebook is growing it does not surprise me that there IT staff is being challenged with traffic issues….and perhaps losing sleep!
I to have been having log in issues. Normally if I click on the Facebook link on my toolbar it goes right in but all day today I’ve had to log in. And now I can’t access any apps at all. The apps were fine this morning but now I can’t get on any of them.