Social network downtime in 2008
This is a list of 14 of the largest social networks in the world, and how much downtime they have had so far in 2008.
| Social Network | Home page (monitored) | Downtime in 2008 (until Feb 25) |
|---|---|---|
| Bebo | www.bebo.com | 12h 28m |
| Windows Live Spaces | spaces.live.com | 7h 25m |
| Friendster | www.friendster.com | 6h 0m |
| hi5 | www.hi5.com | 5h 5m |
| Reunion.com | www.reunion.com | 2h 55m |
| www.linkedin.com | 4h 0m | |
| Classmates.com | www.classmates.com | 2h 5m |
| www.facebook.com | 1h 35m | |
| Orkut | www.orkut.com | 1h 10m |
| Last.fm | www.last.fm | 1h 10m |
| Xanga | www.xanga.com | 45m |
| MySpace | www.myspace.com | 25m |
| LiveJournal | www.livejournal.com | 10m |
| Yahoo! 360 | 360.yahoo.com | 5m |
As we mentioned in a recent report, Bebo’s downtime has increased significantly lately and has had by far the most downtime of the 14 social networks we monitored for this survey. More than 12 hours of downtime in less than two months is a lot, and it could possibly be caused by the new open application platform that Bebo launched in December, allowing third-party developers access to its platform, Facebook style. It could be putting more strain on Bebo’s systems than they anticipated.
The two giants in the field, MySpace (with 25 minutes of downtime) and Facebook (with one hour and 35 minutes of downtime), can both be considered to be within acceptable limits, especially MySpace.
Social networks, just like any other websites on the internet, will occasionally suffer from downtime, either planned or unplanned. However, social networks have a different type of usage than most websites, with frequent visits from the same user and many page views per visit. Therefore downtime can often be even more noticeable and frustrating to social network users.
A note about the monitoring: All monitoring was done using Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service. If a web page is not reachable, returns an error, or takes longer than 30 seconds to load, it is considered as down. Downtime is always confirmed from two geographically separate locations.
 |
[...] How much downtime is acceptable is a question that must be answered. Some people think that you should never have down time, but they just don’t understand technology. There’s always a certain percentage chance that something unexpected could happen and bring you down. A quick look at this list of social network downtime shows this reality. I can’t believe that bebo was down for 12 hours. That’s an eternity in social network time. The most impressive stat on the list is MySpace only being down 25 minutes this year. That’s very impressive considering the volume of traffic they have. [...]
[...] Royal Pingdom is out with another report on downtime, this time focusing on the leading social networks. Bebo leads the way with nearly 12 and a half hours of downtime, meaning that from the period of January 1st thru February 25th, it was down roughly 0.7% of the time. Meanwhile, top socnets MySpace and Facebook were each down for less than 2 hours, with the once unreliable MySpace sporting only 25 minutes of downtime. [...]
[...] Representatives from Pingdom, a performance monitoring software company, posted a blog entry on Tuesday with the results of a study that monitored how much downtime 14 major social networks experienced between Jan. 1 and Feb. 25. Bebo, which is most popular in the U.K. and Ireland, clocked in a total of 12 hours and 28 minutes of downtime. In second place was Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces, with seven hours and 25 minutes of downtime recorded, and Friendster came in third with six hours even. [...]
[...] When Bebo launched their platform last month, I suggested that we were witnessing the beginning of the social platform wars. It now appears that Facebook may have already won the first platform war. If you were expecting a massive transfer of developers over to the Bebo platform, you would have guessed wrong. So far 1375 applications have launched on the Bebo platform. Of those, only 358 were launched this month. If this isn’t a bad omen, how about the fact that their platform has experienced the most downtime of any social network this year to date. [...]
[...] Representatives from Pingdom, a performance monitoring software company, posted a blog entry on Tuesday with the results of a study that monitored how much downtime 14 major social networks experienced between Jan. 1 and Feb. 25. Bebo, which is most popular in the U.K. and Ireland, clocked in a total of 12 hours and 28 minutes of downtime. In second place was Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces, with seven hours and 25 minutes of downtime recorded, and Friendster came in third with six hours even. [...]
[...] My favorite blog in the world has a post about the year to date downtime of various social networks which is revealing. Not a single one achieves the famous “three nines” uptime SLA (although Amazon’s S3 service offers a two nines 99.99% uptime guarantee). [...]
[...] Downtime: Bebo has over 12 hours downtime in two months This is downright embarrassing. 12 hours is barely acceptable in a whole year, let alone Jan-Feb of this year. Other culprits include Microsoft live spaces, Friendster then Hi5. Let’s hope downtime reduces for the rest of the year. [...]
[...] It has only been two months into the new year. An early peek into the server downtimes at the various social networking websites: [...]
[...] But wait, kids, they’ve saved the best for last: Just In Case You Need A Little Convincing… Here’s just one reason, out of many, we think LiveJournal deserves your vote. So far in 2008, LiveJournal has had less downtime than MySpace, Friendster, Facebook and LinkedIn. In fact, with only ten minutes of downtime, LiveJournal has had a full 12 hours and 18 minutes less downtime than Bebo. See the pingdom post for the complete list of social networks and their downtime. [...]