The five-hour-plus disappearance of Facebook and its family of apps on Oct 4 and then again on Oct 8th, affected about 3.5 billion people globally and disrupted one of the world’s primary communications and business platforms. These back to back outages are now part of a technology folklore to be told again and often, specially during discussions around what to do and how to prevent such outages.
These incidents raise concerns. If such a widely maintained platform can be vulnerable to outages, is any site or app safe?
The uncomfortable answer is no. Outages of varying scope and duration are a fact of life. Technology breaks, people make mistakes, stuff happens.
The right question for every company has always been and remains not whether an outage could occur — of course it could — but what can be done to reduce the risk, duration, and impact.
Read the full article on four lessons learnt from Facebook outages