

Ongoing Facebook API Outage Worries Developers. Can the Web Depend on FB? - jfi
http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2010/05/07/07readwriteweb-can-the-web-depend-on-facebook-ongoing-api-23641.html

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kmavm
Since this was my group's bug (search infrastructure), I can shine a little
light.

"Ongoing" is in the article title, but the actual glitch started Thursday
night and continued into Friday morning. The title also makes it sound as
though the entire Facebook API was broken; to clarify, we were returning stale
results from stream search for several hours due to a software issue. This
impacted clients like, e.g., kurrently.com or <http://likebutton.me/?q=Bieber>
; you would see results from the start of the incident, rather than up-to-date
ones.

We've resolved the software issue, and put alerting in place to ensure that we
notice sooner. In the future, if you depend on Facebook stream search and
notice a flagrant failure like this, feel free to tell me about it: kma at
facebook.com

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aaronbrethorst
I don't suppose the platform team has a platform status RSS feed or twitter
account anywhere? It'd be nice to know about any and every issue occurring in
the platform.

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kmavm
There's the Facebook platform page here and its matching twitter account, but
they're not really what you're looking for, are they? Some of my colleagues in
platform are probably reading this; I'll ask around at work tomorrow.

<http://www.facebook.com/platform> <http://www.twitter.com/fbplatform>

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Not quite, yeah. I'm looking for something more along the lines of
<http://status.twitter.com/>, specifically for the FB platform. thanks!

Btw, pity you folks aren't looking for PMs in Seattle right now. I'd love to
apply :)

~~~
kmavm
Is this more helpful?

<http://developers.facebook.com/live_status>

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Yes! I'd love to see the Graph API stuff integrated in there, too, though, but
I bet you guys are already doing that :)

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ZachPruckowski
The whole point of the web is that it's decentralized. It shouldn't be
dependent on Facebook or any other site. Obviously, that extreme is
impractical, but it's something to strive for.

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gdeglin
It's good to see the poor stability of the Facebook API starting to get some
more public attention. Much of the downtime that top Facebook apps have is due
to the platform itself and developers are often powerless to do anything about
it. It's disappointing to see that platform stability is still bad even though
Facebook has been at this for nearly 3 years.

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dman
Works as designed -

"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't
even know existed can render your own computer unusable." — Leslie Lamport

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jrockway
Sure see a lot of complaints about Facebook and the App Store these days.
Maybe the whole "walled garden" thing isn't as great as it seems.

(Insert analogy about a walled garden where everyone brings their cows to pee.
The grass is now greener on the other side of the wall..)

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mattmiller
Last week an email went out to a lot of big wigs in my company with over the
top complaints about some features not working on my software. I was annoyed
and kinda bummed. Now I am just glad it didn't make it into the NY Times.

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Qz
To be succinct: Obv not.

