Engineers are working overtime at Facebook’s new HQ
Facebook isn’t having a good May. First its IPO didn’t “pop” and then the stock traded down the week after it went public. And on Thursday night the social network experienced a substantial outage, going dark for up to 80 minutes for some people. The site is still loading slowly for me and is apparently out for some people at 6:35 PT.
This isn’t just an inconvenience for users — it’s a big deal for Facebook, which can’t make money when users can’t access the site. As it said in the risks section of its IPO filings with the SEC, if Facebook is “unavailable when users attempt to access it, or if it does not load as quickly as they expect, users may not return to our website as often in the future, or at all.”
Like Google, Facebook can’t make money if users can’t see ads, so keeping it up is both a necessity and the source of a huge amount of spending and engineering talent.
I’ve emailed the crew responsible for keeping Facebook up and running for comment. The site has had its share of hiccups, as well as outright outages such as this one in 2010 caused by database error. It also went down briefly earlier this year. But for a site with almost one billion users, Facebook has proven to be remarkably resilient. I expect we’ll soon hear from the company on what caused its latest problem, given its openness around engineering efforts. Remember, delivering five nines (99.999 percent) reliability — which means your site is down less than 5.26 minutes a year — on the web is hard, so hard it may indeed be a pipe dream.
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