Facebook Unveils Details of Downtime

An anonymous reader writes "Facebook officially gave out more technical details on the endless loop in a database control mechanism that forced a 2.5-hour shutdown of the social site, and the resulting combination of a productivity burst, increased fertility (check back on June 25, 2011) and mass hysteria all around the world."

Official Technical Details

[ProdigyPuNk]

You are using an incompatible web browser. Sorry, we're not cool enough to support your browser. Please keep it real with one of the following browsers:

Obviously, the error was caused by too many people not keeping it real.

Wifey was gutted... I wasn't

[rabidjoe]

In the downtime I tried to show the woman the virtues of an IRC channel she could share with family and friends and how much less bullshit she would find there..... "does it have farmville?". There is no hope for the sheeples, the planet is doomed

Re:not very technical

[ProdigyPuNk]

You've got to read some of the comments posted in that thread, it's hilarious.

Anoesj Sadraee It's great to hear and see that big companies like Facebook are so open with what they do. That's rare, very rare. Thanks!

Anne Uriarte ~facebook is stiLL sooo sLow for uz irr! >;'((

Phil McBride this site is becoming less secure lately... hackers are becoming more and more intelligent, i would know, cuz im a white hat lol

No one is thinking about the big losses here...

[ProdigyPuNk]

Let's look at the important thing here with this outage: How many cows, pigs, chickens, cats, goldfish, etc were made to suffer? I know my girlfriend couldn't take care of her virtual cats, and their litterbox ended up full. They were not at all happy. I'm sure the same thing played out across thousands of FarmVille, MyPets, etc accounts. Please, won't someone think of the animal?

Re:"mass hysteria"?

[Anonymous Coward]

To me, Facebook is about as integral to my life as the toilet is. It's there, it's gonna be used every once in a while and it involves a bit of dirty business that you just can't avoid.

less productivity actually

[Valpis]

instead of people checking facebook every 5 minutes for the latest, very important, updates as they always do they now constantly was hitting reload for 2.5 hour

My Favorite Downtime

[WankersRevenge]

My favorite server downtime story occurred back in early 2000 when I was working for Disney's Internet Group. All the message boards for the film and television websites ended up crashing. No one knew the cause and as the web-ops team investigated, we learned that the messageboard server wasn't even housed in any of Disney' server farms. After a lot of hair pulling, we found the server was located in a satellite office in Sunnyvale. Evidently, the server was just on an engineers desk. When that engineer left the company he neglected to tell anyone about the box so when the new engineer took his spot, she found she didn't like the noise from the machine. So one day, she pulled the plug, and put it in some out of the way spot in the office. There wasn't a lot of traffic on it, but it still makes me laugh to think of all the Tim Allen fans in distress over a misplaced box.

Re:not very technical

[elewton]

You could spend it on Karma whores or play Karma poker.

Eerie sight

[NicknamesAreStupid]

As Facebook went off-line, I witnessed the unthinkable at an Internet cafe. Young men and women, innocently engaging in social networking intercourse, were suddenly thrown out of their Facebook world and into the reality of the real world, as though all had taken the red pill. Images distorted into 3D with a startling range of colors, sounds beyond stereo, and smells -- odors for the new fifth sense. Everyone looked around to witness "super high def" of each other, and some actually stood to experience a new perspective. Then, as if in concert, the unplugged Facebookers began to touch each other. Immediately untapped hormones raged as ancient primal urges emerged for the first time. Just as it was about to become an orgy of primal lust, the Cafe manager flipped on a You Tube video of Elmo, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZHSDjtD-dg [youtube.com], and a disaster was avoided.

it's only facebook

[thetoadwarrior]

Who cares if it's down even for a day. Just talk about your pointless activities twice as long the next day.