(…for about an hour and a half…)

The meteoric rise of Facebook continues to astonish me. No doubt it’s in part due to my own demographic positioning; apparently living in London (the largest geographic group on Facebook with around 840,000 members- which is around a tenth of the city’s population) and being in the fastest rising age group (25 and over), it makes sense that I’d naturally be seeing a lot of my friends joining up and talking about it.

Earlier this week, after an apparent security glitch, Facebook closed down for a while (about 90 minutes or so, it seems.)

Now, there’s a number of websites that I’ve visited regularly over the years that I’ve been using the internet, ranging from functional tools like search engines or web-based email, to social sites like chatrooms or discussion forums (the Web 1.0 version of a Facebook group, I suppose), to the newer Web 2.0 sites like Digg and Flickr. I’ve followed the progress and speculation about films, TV programmes, bands and festivals. As a result, there have been a number of times when I’ve gone to a website and been momentarily horrified to find it temporarily closed down.

But I can’t remember a single instance where 90 minutes of a site’s downtime has been as newsworthy as earlier this week, when Facebook closed down for about an hour and a half for “upgrades.” I had pretty much expected to read stories about it on sites technology-oriented sites like Digg.com (which had a couple of stories speculating on the reasons behind the downtime) but I was a bit more suprised to read about it in the Metro this morning. (Not that I normally read the Metro I might add, but I’d just finished the book I was reading at the time…) (more…)

August 2nd, 2007 | WWW, Web Content | No comments