By now most everyone has heard— Facebook was down for (gasp) hours last Thursday. Facebook’s Director of Software Engineering did post a detailed technical description of what went wrong and how it happened here. Besides the obvious backlash of people complaining about not being able to login to check their news feed, Facebook’s service failure reverberated around the web in far more out reaching ways.
Those “like” buttons, quickly becoming more and more ubiquitous around the web, appearing on some 350,000 sites, disappeared for the duration that facebook.com was down. The API that powers their Open Graph system was also wonky during the time the side was resolving its issues. This means that any site with facebook integration (recommendations, login button, comments, activity feed, facepile, likebox or live stream) wasn’t fully functional during that time. Furthermore, any site that uses facebook connect or a facebook login as its primary or only way to function (think Farmville) was rendered completely useless during the time it was down.
It’s one thing for Twitter to go down- but for a site like facebook, which people use for their identity and communication as much as email anymore - to lose functionality for that long has serious implications to businesses.
When you’re running your site and basing some of the main functionality on an independent, third party platform, you must beware that you’ve allowed things to be out of your immediate control. The pluses of using a social network like Facebook for login and enhanced functionality still far outweigh the negatives. But just remember, if problems with those services arise, you have to sit tight and wait for facebook, or whomever else, to smooth them over. No matter how hard you push the closest developer.
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