As Facebook continues to surge in traffic, there is a proportional surge in load on the site’s servers. This week Facebook has been experiencing some reliability issues. Yesterday the site was practically inaccessible for some for a large portion of the day and today the site has faced a reduction in reliability. It’s something that is expected of a rapidly growing site.
With over 10,000 servers running Facebook, ensuring that the site is always online is a substantial feat. Facebook has said that yesterday’s downtime was only for select users but I’ve run tests from California and D.C. and both locations had significant delays. Is it a big deal for Facebook to have delayed ping times or to even be non-responsive? Definitely!
Every minute that the site is down is a lost opportunity for new users. Fortunately, Facebook isn’t known for their extensive downtime. Another problem with Facebook downtime? Millions of users are forced to find something else to do with their “free time”. Now that we’re all used to spending countless hours stalking other people, it’s challenging to come up with other creative uses of our time.
So how do you spend your time when you aren’t on Facebook? Do you visit sites like Twitter and other social media sites when you aren’t on Facebook?
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I'm in Vancouver and I didn't have any problems accessing Facebook. As a student, my friends here in university only use Facebook. Facebook = internet. Facebook being down is like your cell phone battery being dead. It is a bit of a shock and you have to figure out what you can do (if anything) to work around it as quickly as possible.
Comment by tyfn — January 14, 2009 @ 12:01 pm
So far no problems in Europe respectively Germany!
But we know this problems from StudiVZ. It was down at least once a week in 2007. Last year it was ok.
Greets from F**+ cold Mannheim
Michael
Comment by Michael — January 14, 2009 @ 1:25 pm
I didn't have any problems yesterday from Kentucky
Comment by James Clark Embree — January 14, 2009 @ 2:06 pm
I confirm, I got facebook errors yesterday, and the site was damn slow!
From Mauritius, Indian Ocean…lol
Comment by Yashvin — January 14, 2009 @ 7:04 pm
No problem in the UK, but this artilce points out what it is going to be the main problem of 2009 for FB: managing this amazing growth!
Comment by Guillaume — January 15, 2009 @ 2:10 pm
I confirm, I got facebook errors last week n still, and the site was damn slow!
Comment by may — January 18, 2009 @ 1:08 pm
Update: All day yesterday, FB Chat was on the fritz for all the users on my campus. It kept saying there were no friends available to chat
Comment by James Clark Embree — January 19, 2009 @ 7:01 pm
I live in Dubai (UAE), and I have been experiencing problems for the past week and it's actually making me think about leaving facebook.Its turning out to be really unreliable…
Comment by Lebo Mosai — January 21, 2009 @ 11:19 am
Today FB did not work for many hours in the Czech Republic. Support is not available. Reset password unavailable.
Comment by Jan — January 21, 2010 @ 4:28 am
I'm in the UK and facebook has been getting particularly bad for me since late in 2009, peaking in downtime and slowness as of the past few weeks. It's making me use myspace more instead. :-/
Comment by Josh — January 25, 2010 @ 2:37 pm