Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook and the company’s most visible infrastructure executive, announced he is leaving the company at the end of the summer.
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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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Facebook’s data center costs have more than doubled in just over a year, according to estimates.
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This afternoon Rich Miller of DataCenterKnowledge posted an update from Tom Cook’s presentation at the Velocity conference last week which illustrates Facebook’s ongoing thirst for data storage and processing power. While Cook didn’t present any numbers, Rich Miller is estimating that the server count has most likely surpassed 60,000 servers at this point. I’m also proud to announce that our sites (AllFacebook & SocialTimes) are powered by a massive number of servers: 4.
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Rather than continuing with large leasing agreements as the company scales its user base, Facebook is deciding to develop their own data centers according to Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge. The news comes at a time when Facebook is racing toward 400 million users. Given that the company has become “cash flow positive” and has more cash from the most recent DST investment, building their own data center makes more sense.
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