Yesterday afternoon Facebook experienced the worst outage that the company has had “in over four years”, causing the site to go down for most users for “approximately 2.5 hours”. One of the company’s engineers followed up with a blog post, explaining exactly what went wrong. The cause of the issue sounds relatively complicated, however the conclusion was that the company had to restart the entire site.
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If you’ve tried searching for someone on Facebook in the past 24 hours, there’s a good chance you didn’t find them. The reason is that Facebook’s people search functionality hasn’t been working. While we don’t know when the problem will be resolved, we’re sure this is a big problem considering that most people search for other users on Facebook regularly.
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Want to browse Facebook to see what your friends are doing or to catch up on to harvest your farms on FarmVille? Good luck! Over the past 24 hours I’ve been receiving numerous emails from users reporting that many features on Facebook have been unavailable. I’ve also been experiencing problems. This morning I tried to load my friend requests page and it just failed. On the AllFacebook page I tried viewing comments and likes of one of the posts and an AJAX error popped up.
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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!
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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!
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