Facebook is generally pretty reliable, but it seems like they may be growing too fast.  Yesterday, my Facebook site was out of action for at least 12 hours.  I wondered if I was being punished for using it (!), but it appears that it was just having technical problems – the site was down for maintenance.

It came up a couple of times during the day, but just for a few minutes, so I’m holding the intention that all will be well soon.  Fortunately, there were plenty of other things I could get on with, including preparing notes for tomorrow when I’ll be talking about – guess what – using Facebook for SponsorDaddy!  Today, Facebook seemed to be almost OK – it worked pretty well except that it seems to have lost some of my contact information.

What appears to have happened is that, due to the phenomenal growth of Facebook, it got overloaded.  As far as I can tell, the problem is in the friend linking part of the system.  When I think about it, I have added about 600 friends in the last three weeks.

If each of them has a few hundred friends, think of the number of links (or virtual links) that are needed for me to be able to see all the friends of my 1,000+ friends, and to see which of them are mutual friends!  A few thousand of us doing this can easily bring a system to its knees.

What is the answer?  Never assume any system (or social network) is 100% reliable.  Accept that, just as Windows crashes or freezes sometimes, Facebook or any other system will crash or freeze.  Build redundancy into your way of working, and you’ll be protected!