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.
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The tech industry is littered with billionaires. We all enjoy a good income, but some clearly have earned more than others. Much, much more. The question is, how much money do the really big names in tech actually have?
Francois
February 26th, 2008 at 10:41 am
Wow, that is scary, how can you be down for 12 hours so far this year! Maybe they have been expanding faster than they could keep up with, or just had bad hosts, either way Bebo is in trouble! Thats a forecast of what, 3 full days this year if they keep it up?
Mike
February 26th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
12 and half hours in the first 2 months of ‘08? Jeebus! Facebook looks to have improved drastically from just 6 months ago.
By the way, can you include fubar.com in your next test? We’re small, but we’re trying!
ps: we’ve had zero downtime in ‘08. yay?
-mike
Shane
February 26th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
Would have loved to seen stats for Twitter! Maybe next time.
Kelly
February 29th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
I bet LinkedIn’s numbers are way off after this week.
K.
Miles Attacca
February 29th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
The downtime ratings fail to take into account what’s basically “live downtime,” the prime example being MySpace, where roughly 10% of my clicks to internal pages result in pages that say “Server too busy” or “an unexpected error has occurred.” If you ask me, their ranking would be absolutely abhorrent if those important factors were taken into account.
Ryan Dunn
February 29th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Ditto to Miles. I give props to LJ for its stability after so many years and having seen it in early stages where no one expected to see it go down like it had. Still leads the pack for a content based social networking service (as opposed to FB/MS which drown their users with not only ads but pointless bits of communicative drivel).
Master Dave
March 11th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
How about Tribe? And some of the others?
The thing is, people look at these lists, and see only big-name companies. Small companies, like fubar.com, of which I had never before heard, do not, then, get a chance to grow. This is too bad.
Why use a small site? Less garbage! I visited a few MySpace pages which came up in Google searches. They were slow to load, slowed My computer, and were, generally, incomprehensible. No MySpace for Me!
Small sites need more exposure. Especially when they are better.