Facebook might be the most popular social network on the planet and may be starring in an upcoming movie, but it’s far from perfect. As with anything based off the web, you’re depending a whole lot on coding and servers to keep your site online, and if one piece of code goes bad, the whole thing goes belly-up. A coding problem is the reason why Facebook suffered what Facebook engineer Robert Johnson describes as its “worst outage in over four years” yesterday.
Here’s how Johnson explains Thursday’s down time, which is not related to Wednesday’s down time the site also suffered for some people. If this explanation makes sense to you, then you’re a smarter person than I am, because it’s all Greek to me. “Today we made a change to the persistent copy of a configuration value that was interpreted as invalid. This meant that every single client saw the invalid value and attempted to fix it. Because the fix involves making a query to a cluster of databases, that cluster was quickly overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of queries a second. To make matters worse, every time a client got an error attempting to query one of the databases it interpreted it as an invalid value, and deleted the corresponding cache key. This meant that even after the original problem had been fixed, the stream of queries continued.”
Well, hopefully the problem is solved now. Feel free to resume using Facebook to cheat on your spouse, post pictures of yourself, and talk to your white friends. It could’ve been worse Facebookers; you could be using Twitter, which has a history of failure dating back to Shakespearean England.
Tags: Facebook, Facebook outage, Facebook down, why Facebook is down, facebook broken, social networking, Facebook offline, Facebook disabled, technical problems, database errors, Facebook taken offline after coding error, unusual accidents, Robert Johnson