Facebook Goes Down and People Freak Out
Saturday, September 25, 2010
For two-and-a-half hours, many of the 550 million Facebook users experienced the "e-pocalypse" this past Thursday.
Two days ago, Facebook experienced an outage due to a glitch on Facebook's databases causing the site to be unavailable for a few hours.
As expected, Facebook was prompt with a resolution to the site's blackout and the site was restored without any changes. Facebook's representative, Robert Johnson, sent a public message via Facebook explaining the situation and apologizing for any inconveniences it might have caused.
Many were not able to update their status, share their pictures, "like" their friend's post, or comment on the trending news; activities that have become regular tasks for thousands, if not millions, of people.
Furthermore, something more impressive is the speed at which the news spread and the amount of attention it generated.
CNN, The Huffington Post, and The New York Times, to mention a few, reported this issue and kept updating their online posts as they found new details on the story. Other websites, like Network World and CBS News, went a little deeper into the story by reporting technical explanations to the outage.
Today, two days after the outage happened, news reports about the Facebook issue are still showing up on my RSS Feeds, which makes me think: Is the media being too dramatic or is Facebook so big and indispensable that it deserves that much attention?
Of course, this little Facebook incident has shown how addictive social media has become, but I do not think it required that much attention, specially if the site only went down for two hours.
Many were not able to update their status, share their pictures, "like" their friend's post, or comment on the trending news; activities that have become regular tasks for thousands, if not millions, of people.
Furthermore, something more impressive is the speed at which the news spread and the amount of attention it generated.
CNN, The Huffington Post, and The New York Times, to mention a few, reported this issue and kept updating their online posts as they found new details on the story. Other websites, like Network World and CBS News, went a little deeper into the story by reporting technical explanations to the outage.
Today, two days after the outage happened, news reports about the Facebook issue are still showing up on my RSS Feeds, which makes me think: Is the media being too dramatic or is Facebook so big and indispensable that it deserves that much attention?
Of course, this little Facebook incident has shown how addictive social media has become, but I do not think it required that much attention, specially if the site only went down for two hours.
Can you imagine what would happen if Facebook ever decides to close down the website? Heaven forbid.
