It's hard to overstate the damage this is causing for merchants that prominently display FB like on their pages - lots of big ugly blank spaces / errors out there.
Realize this is temporary but shows why if you install any external vendor tool as a part of your site make contingency plans that switch on errors.
You're telling me--of course this has to happen the day before client review of a major Facebook Connect site whose only authentication is via Facebook Accounts. We had discussed potentially having two types of accounts (Facebook- and email-based), but having two parallel authentication methods just seemed clunky. I guess this is the price we pay for trying to keep things simple...
Seeing as Facebook login lets you easily collect email addresses these days you could always have a page that says, facebook is down click here to get an email confirmation link to login or something similar.
Unfortunately its difficult to avoid relying on other businesses for crucial systems.
Example: Payment Processing, try building a business, especially an online one, without depending on Paypal, or at least Mastercard/Visa.
Sure you can reduce it by say not having FB Connect as the only log-on option but the simple fact is that you will almost always have to depend on other businesses, the best you can do is diversify and hope for the best.
Exactly...people made this same argument a few years back when Amazon S3 went down for a few hours. Just have a few different options, and the chance that they will all be down at the same time is pretty slim.
Yes and No. If you have a few options than your entire business won't come grinding to a halt but if half of your customers choose to use FB Connect as their login option than they likely don't care that FB's down, or that people with email logins can still access your site. To 50% of your user-base your site has failed and so in that sense I would say that you still rely on FB for your business.
I don't think we're uncommon. Most sites that I see plastered with Facebook embeds are publications, and I'm sure they all see results similar to ours. Facebook is RSS for the masses.
I came here to post this same thing, but I just started thinking about it. When was the last time FB went down like this and took a bunch of core functionality down with it? Has it ever happened? And how long are they down...30 mins? Is that 30 mins of downtime every few years really more damaging than that the (potential) value that integration with the graph API or FB Connect can bring? Yes, you look like an idiot to a few users, but maybe you have 100x as many users as you'd have otherwise. I think the real reason not to build your business on the FB API (or Twitter or whoever) is strategic, not because of potential downtime.
I fully agree with you. If your app is heavily social it would be ridiculous not to leverage the worlds largest social network, even with very occasional down-time.
You're right, I should have phrased it "And that, my friends, is one of the many reasons its risky to build your entire business on top of FB Graph API."
Just went through a nightmare building a product entirely on top of fb graph. FB fails, a lot. And not just in terms of downtime, in terms of inconsistently implemented technology, poor documentation, lack of transparency, inconsistent policies etc.
Not saying don't use FB ever, just that it's risky.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I won't do FB apps for clients anymore, despite the high demand and great pay. It's just way too stressful to have the clients always angry at me because of the platform's shortcomings.
As an aside I notice that 'Facebook' is not a trending topic on Twitter. Seems the term must be blacklisted in some way along with all the swears and other undesirable terms.
There are more principled ways to do that than a blacklist, though, like looking at current frequency compared to typical frequency. That way even something commonly mentioned could still genuinely be trending if it gets mentioned much more than usual on a particular day.
(It's possible there are scale-related reasons that make this infeasible, though.)
Just not tracking the frequency of the most common words that will never be in the trending topics is probably a big performance win. I'm sure there is an additional blacklist that includes stuff like "and" and "the".
Current Status: API Latency Issues
We are currently experiencing latency issues with the API, and we are actively investigating. We will provide an update when either the issue is resolved or we have an ETA for resolution.
joking aside, this actually had this effect, as so many pages actually resolve some components to facebook.com, the slower response was felt on a wide variety of sites.
First I just had an empty feed, then I got the feed back but posting links and comments timed out. Then it worked for a minute, and now I get the DNS error. Seems like this affects several of Facebook's applications.
Everyone should calm down and realize that Facebook being down for a few hours is not going to kill anyone's business. It may cause trouble and disruption, but not anything more intense than a daily commute in Los Angeles.
That being said, this makes me question Facebook's ability to deliver on the "Social Graph" promise. If they truly want to build a completely social internet, this kind of downtime can't happen.
> "If they truly want to build a completely social internet, this kind of downtime can't happen."
Why not?
Even commerce sites such as Amazon or Ebay have downtime. Studies demonstrate that unless you're selling a perfectly commoditized generic product, obtainable instantly from multiple sources, downtime doesn't materially impact revenue.
Users seem to manage to "queue up" their intended actions and do them when a site is back. And it's not like Facebook's users can gravitate en masse to anywhere else.
The founding principle of the internet is not "5 nines" uptime for all components, but resiliency. Switch off your mail server for a few hours; you'll still get all your mail when you turn it back on.
"Kids these days" build apps and APIs (and sites that rely on APIs) that are much more brittle, because today's developers are spoiled into thinking communication conduits are reliable. They're not.
The fabric fails, so your site, your apps, your protocols, should fail gracefully -- and recover gracefully later.
112 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadRealize this is temporary but shows why if you install any external vendor tool as a part of your site make contingency plans that switch on errors.
Great, simple services but the macro effect that this is going to have on commerce today is crazy.
Luckily, they added Twitter authentication as well. But still, now a large portion of their site cannot login because of Facebook.
Example: Payment Processing, try building a business, especially an online one, without depending on Paypal, or at least Mastercard/Visa.
Sure you can reduce it by say not having FB Connect as the only log-on option but the simple fact is that you will almost always have to depend on other businesses, the best you can do is diversify and hope for the best.
facebook uptime has been good overall, considering they doubled in size in 12 months to 550m users
enough is enough!
> if you don't really need it.
In your case, you obviously do.
http://www.facebook.com/developers/chart.php?type=at_total_t...
In terms of reliability, FB is not twitter, but it certainly isn't google either...
Just went through a nightmare building a product entirely on top of fb graph. FB fails, a lot. And not just in terms of downtime, in terms of inconsistently implemented technology, poor documentation, lack of transparency, inconsistent policies etc.
Not saying don't use FB ever, just that it's risky.
Which seems a bit underhand by Twitter.
Edit: I notice that 'Facebook isnt working' has appeared now. I've blogged about this issue here: http://blog.dansingerman.com/post/1174729229/twitter-mostly-... (if anyone cares)
There were hundreds of items on the list
(Edit: here is this link for now: http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/15/another-security-tip-for-tw...
I am sure that I saved the entire page of blacklisted words)
(It's possible there are scale-related reasons that make this infeasible, though.)
http://twitpic.com/1yqrwc
http://developers.facebook.com/
(YMMV based on local cache etc.)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_eye
That being said, this makes me question Facebook's ability to deliver on the "Social Graph" promise. If they truly want to build a completely social internet, this kind of downtime can't happen.
Why not?
Even commerce sites such as Amazon or Ebay have downtime. Studies demonstrate that unless you're selling a perfectly commoditized generic product, obtainable instantly from multiple sources, downtime doesn't materially impact revenue.
Users seem to manage to "queue up" their intended actions and do them when a site is back. And it's not like Facebook's users can gravitate en masse to anywhere else.
The founding principle of the internet is not "5 nines" uptime for all components, but resiliency. Switch off your mail server for a few hours; you'll still get all your mail when you turn it back on.
"Kids these days" build apps and APIs (and sites that rely on APIs) that are much more brittle, because today's developers are spoiled into thinking communication conduits are reliable. They're not.
The fabric fails, so your site, your apps, your protocols, should fail gracefully -- and recover gracefully later.
War was Beginning.
Internet: What happen?
MarkZ: Somebody set up us the bomb.
FB: We get signal
MarkZ: What?!
FB: Main screen turn on.
MarkZ: It's you!!
DDH: How are you gentlemen !!
DDH: All your Information are belong to us.
DDH: You are on the way to destruction.