The problem with depending on one provider (facebook) for anything

8 points by justinph 16y ago ↗ HN

Right now, Facebook's servers are intermittently loading and serving pages. This is causing some of the simple little tools they want everywhere on the web to not load properly--that like button is now just a white hole in the middle of your web page. Are we sure we want to depend on Facebook for this functionality?

4 comments

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tlrobinson 16y ago ↗

Indeed: http://cl.ly/aRl

iamdave 16y ago ↗

Yep. I was just asking about this in an irc channel. One guy's connecting fine, the guy sitting next to him in his office is can't get to the site at all.

edit: 18:10 EST, seems to be back up.

justinph 16y ago ↗

Here's the screenshot, for good measure: http://i.imgur.com/CMZgW.png

jacquesm 16y ago ↗

That's why you try to minimize your dependencies on third party services for your own business critical sites.

If you don't really need that .js widget it is better to do without it, if you do really need it make sure it fails gracefully if it isn't available.

Sometimes that means that you have to verify if the service is up periodically, and serve up modified pages during downtime for the widgets.