Social Networks
Why Friendster Went Down
The data center power outage that brought down Friendster didn’t just leave them powerless. It also left their data center soaked in fire suppressant.
“Regrettably, the maintenance did not go as planned and we suffered a catastrophic UPS failure at 8:22 am Pacific Standard Time,†said Mark Waddington, President of Quality Technology Services, in an incident report for customers. “The UPS failed to stand in and smoothly transfer power from the utility to the temporary generators due to a voltage regulator problem with the temporary generators. The failure resulted in the triggering of the FM200 (fire suppression) system in the enclosed battery room and the subsequent EPO as part of our life safety system.â€
FM200 is a popular fire suppression system that uses a chemical “clean agent†rather than water. The EPO (Emergency Power Off) button instantly cuts power in the data center when a situation presents a risk to worker safety or equipment.
The Santa Clara facility was back on generator power within two hours, but Friendster remained offline for more than 23 hours over three days. While it has been eclipsed in the U.S. by MySpace and Facebook, Friendster has seen strong growth in international markets (particularly the Philippines) and says it has 85 million users.
When Friendster came back online, many of its users found large chunks of their friend lists missing, triggering rumors that the site had been hacked.
Friendster’s spotty data caching caused slow updates in years past, and contributed to its decline in the face of MySpace and Facebook. In the face of disaster, that problem returns to hound Friendster. Click here to continue reading "Why Friendster Went Down"...
Friendster Down. Who Cares?
Five million Filipinos can’t find their friends this morning, because Friendster is down. Jim Ayson’s contact at the social networking service says the downtime is due to a power outage at Friendster’s US data center.
To be fair, Friendster is trying to engage the local blogosphere in a key geographic market. Most of their users are in the Philippines, where I also happen to be based. They invited me to a roundtable with their marketing guy the other day, but I was too busy to come. Nevertheless, all the marketing in the world cannot make up for service outages.
Of course, Facebook is now the world’s number one social network, so we’ve still got that to keep up with our friends. I’m going to watch the traffic stats on this post to see if anyone still cares about Friendster.
