• Early today Facebook was down or unreachable for many of you for approximately 2.5 hours. This is the worst outage we’ve had in over four years, and we wanted to first of all apologize for it.
• Facebook employee Robert Johnson • Explaining why Facebook was so broken today. Simply put, there was a configuration error so huge that it caused the entire site to fall over itself. It created a feedback loop in a cluster of databases and couldn’t handle the number of requests. All engineers could do to stop it was turn off the site for two and a half hours. That’s right. The entire site. It’s not often that Facebook crashes at all, let alone in the middle of the day on a weekday. That was epic, eh? source

Posted by Ernie Smith • Permalink