Is a Glitch in Web Performance a Real Pain in Facebook's Backside?

Facebook continues to grow and grow and grow … It was just in November 2010 that Mark Zuckerberg (News - Alert), Facebook creator and CEO, took a risk in the low usage of location-based services. Neglecting Pew (News - Alert) Research Center’s Internet and American Life study, which claimed that only four percent of adults use location-based services, Facebook (News - Alert) was willing to challenge the market, claiming that it has 30 million users.

Most recently it was reported that Goldman Sachs, the global investment banking and securities firm, invested $450 million in the hot social networking firm. Goldman is aiming to raise as much as $1.5 billion from its wealthy clients to invest in Facebook, posing Facebook as an unstoppable social networking source.

However, this networking giant has its bad days, and for us Facebook junkies it is a chain effect. News has come in today, Jan. 14, that Facebook is experiencing some serious down-time issues. Twitter is abuzz with members at a loss for their Facebook socializing fix. DownRightNow, showing down-time lengths of sites experiencing problems, visually illustrates the Facebook outage as over five hours length.

However, as we all know, at least the 30 million of us and counting members, Facebook experiences these issues without so much as a glitch in its popularity. For instance, back at the end of August 2010, TMC’s CEO, Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) wrote in a blog post, “Facebook is experiencing a major rolling outage and repeated attempts by me on multiple devices on multiple networks from multiple IP addresses has shown the systems are in major flux with the most usual result being a timeout error. Users have been reporting the problem started somewhere between 12:00 AM EST and 4:00 AM EST”

Even market moguls, such as Facebook, need some downtime. Doesn’t mean it isn’t working behind the scenes. For instance, the standard IPv6 on the Web is soon to run out of available addresses and to raise public awareness of the move to IPv6, Google, Facebook and Yahoo are taking the lead. Facebook will be back up and stronger before you know it.