downtime - ReadWriteWeb

Social Network Downtime in 2008: LinkedIn Up - Twitter Down

Frederic Lardinois — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 09:25:25 -0800

According to a new report (PDF) from uptime monitoring service Pingdom, Facebook and MySpace, the two largest players in the social networking market, had very little downtime in 2008. Twitter, whose iconic Fail Whale adorned the service far too often at the beginning of the year, got its act together and was only down for 12 minutes in December. LinkedIn, on the other hand, saw an increased rate of outages in the course of the year.

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]]> Out of the 15 major social networks in Pingdom's study, only five achieved an uptime of 99.9% or better: Facebook (99.92%), MySpace (99.94%), Classmates.com (99.95%), Xanga (99.95%), and Imeem (99.95%).

Twitter and LinkedIn

Twitter saw 84% of its downtime in the first half of 2008 and suffered no major outages in the second half of the year. Even though Twitter continues its rapid growth, it has clearly managed to gets its infrastructure under control.

The reliability of LinkedIn, however, is slipping. With every new quarter, LinkedIn's downtime increased. Clearly, LinkedIn's continuous growth is responsible for some of these outages. In terms of total hours of downtime , LinkedIn's 45.8 hours were only trumped by Twitter's 84 hours, though Friendster (43.8 hours) and Reunion.com (41.9 hours) were only marginally better off in 2008.

Other Stats

According to Pingdom, Reunion.com suffered the longest continuous outage, with close to 10 hours on March 29. Facebook's longest continuous outage only lasted for less than half an hour.

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Gmail Goes Down - Twitter Survives

Frederic Lardinois — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:17:53 -0800

Today, Google's Gmail service experienced a system-wide outage that affected regular Gmail accounts as well as enterprise users. In the course of the afternoon, the service came back up for a little while, but as of now, there are still a lot of users who can't access their accounts (Update: looks like Gmail is now up and running again). Google is updating users through a forum on Google Groups. A lot of frustrated Gmail users used Twitter to voice their grievances, which, surprisingly, handled this sudden spike in traffic extremely well.

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]]> Google suffered a similar outage just last week, when a large number of users couldn't access their Google Apps and Gmail accounts, though this time, Google Apps seems to be running just fine.

Update #2: Google has now posted an entry on the Official Gmail blog, explaining that the outage was caused "by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly."

Twitter Keeps Humming Along

As quite a few users on Twitter and FriendFeed pointed out, maybe even more amazing than Gmail suffering a prolonged downtime was the fact that Twitter coped with the sudden spike in traffic very well. That, together with the fact that Twitter has already been quite stable lately, is a promising sign for a service that often went down at random times.

Today, at the height of the outage, Twitter's search returned close to 1000 updates with the word 'gmail' in it within less than five minutes.

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Twitter Leads Social Networks in Downtime, But Still Up Near 99%

Josh Catone — Tue, 06 May 2008 09:40:12 -0800

A new report from Royal Pingdom reveals that Twitter unsurprisingly led social networks in downtime for the first four months of 2008 with a total of 37 hours and 16 minutes. The good news is that even with all that downtime, that's still a 98.72% uptime percentage for the first third of the year -- which isn't terrible. Can we really complain about a free service thats "only" up nearly 99% of the time?

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]]> The next closest social network on the list in terms of downtime was Reunion.com, which was down about half as long as Twitter. Pownce, a Twitter-like microblogging service from Digg founder Kevin Rose that added file sharing and group direct messages, also suffered more than its fair share of downtime over the first few months of the year. The social network that has suffered the fewest outages? MySpace -- just down 1 hour, 5 minutes so far this year.

Twitter wracked up the most downtime during the months of January and February, with 13 hours each. Interestingly, its best month was March, when a lot of people expected heavy tweeting from the SXSW festival would bring Twitter down. Both Twitter's lead architect and VP of engineering left the company last month, which many bloggers assume was in direct correlation to its infamous downtime issues.

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