An outage that lasted for about half an hour was experienced by numerous users of the popular social network, Facebook, in different parts of the world. According to the reports, even this 30 minute outage caused an estimated loss worth $500,000 for the company. Facebook is regarded as the biggest social networking website that exists these days and is known to have more than 1.15 billion users. There are thousands of users who access their Facebook account every hour. However, on June 19th, Thursday, millions of its users discovered to their dismay that they weren’t able to gain access to Facebook for about half an hour.
When they attempted to login to their accounts via the social networking website, they were informed that there was some error and they were working on resolving the issue quickly. It took 30 minutes for that to happen. However, no official statement was made by Facebook Inc. regarding the cause of this outage. Only when the company was asked did it finally admit that the outage indeed took place. A spokesman of the company, Iain Waterman, said that there was an issue on Thursday morning because of which users were unable to access their Facebook account for a short period of time.
He further added that the issue had been resolved quickly and now the website was fully operational. He also apologized for the inconvenience that was caused because of the sudden outage. A 2.5 hour outage had been experienced by the social networking giant back in September 2010. According to reports, the current power outage is the longest that has happened after that incident. As far as the 2010 outage is concerned, the company had issued an official statement and had offered its apologies for the problem caused to its users because of it.
The statement of the social network that was published in 2010 said that an error condition wasn’t handled properly due to which the flaw had become severe and led to the outage. The automated system responsible for configuring the problem ended up worsening it rather than resolving it due to which it took time. Nonetheless, the company had added that they were very serious about the reliability and performance of their website. Luckily, such long outages didn’t occur again. The current one is the longest the website has experienced and also had some serious financial repercussions for the company.
According to a report made by Forbes regarding the financial implications, revenue worth $500,000 was lost by the company. The good news is that the damage still isn’t that severe financially as the website earns revenues of about $1.6 million every hour, which total up to $2.5 billion for the quarter. Therefore, the company only lost half a million, which can only be called a mosquito bite for a firm that has already spent $20 billion on acquisitions for this year. The only serious problem for the company would be the frustration experienced by the users, especially one who need access for work rather than entertainment and socialization.