The social networking company Facebook suffered major embarrassment due to technical difficulty last Wednesday after having servers overload, and putting the site down for just over two hours. “We had a major spike in traffic we simply weren’t prepared for,” said Facebook CIO Tim Campos. “We had an overload that was unexpected, and although we do our best to prepare for the overload, this was pretty unheard of.” Campos says after they fixed the issue, and increased traffic space, they were able to pinpoint the issue. “We always want to improve our service,” said Campos. “And part of that is realizing your mistakes. We were able to pinpoint an unexpected amount of posts and traffic to a residential neighborhood in Denver.”
Campos explained there were a massive number of posts on the site from the area as well as comments and ‘likes’ which ultimately crashed the site. “We had never seen that kind of traffic before in one area,” said Campos. “We may never again. But, we are at least prepared for it now.” The area of Denver known as Stapleton has an inordinate number of elementary schools for the size of the area. Parents of course are excited to show off their photos of their kids’ first day of school, and these posts, along with the average 75 ‘likes’ for each photo ended up being the cause of the crash. The crash wasn’t just dramatic for Facebook, but several Stapleton residents were slightly traumatized. “I wasn’t sure what was going on,” said Stapleton resident Nicole Hodges. “I kept going to the site to check on my ‘likes’ and it just said site not found. It was really frustrating. I wasn’t sure who was following me, and had no idea who was liking my photos and posts. It probably cost me 10 to 20 likes.” Parent Katie McDonald was also frustrated. “I was trying to make sure I liked everyone’s first day of school posts,” said McDonald. “I was getting behind when suddenly, the site just shut down. I really hope I didn’t miss anyone. Believe me, I was working hard to like everyone’s posts. Especially on an important week like this.”
Facebook says they have included some safeguards to make sure the crash doesn’t happen again. “We now understand how much traffic can spike in that area,” said Campos. “We will make sure to have enough servers to handle twice that load next year.” Good thing, because next year Stapleton will have twice as many back to school pictures. ]]>