“Major failure” takes FriendFeed down
The social aggregation site FriendFeed is currently down as I write this. [Update: It's back up, more on that below.]
“We had a major failure with one of our backends. We are in the process of restoring. We hope to have it back very soon,” co-founder Bret Taylor tells me.
What’s ironic is that people used to switch over to FriendFeed to talk about Twitter being down, back when that micro-messaging service was having all of its problems. Now a ton of people are writing tweets (Twitter messages) about the FriendFeed failure.
FriendFeed’s team has basically schooled Twitter in terms of implementing a number of features, most recently with its instant messaging integration (which Twitter had to disable a while back). But today’s shutdown proves that even the best teams fall victim to downtime.
Update: Taylor just notified me: “We are back up now. We are investigating what caused it and how to prevent it in the future.”
Update 2: Taylor left an update on a FriendFeed thread for a “technical” explanation of the problem.
“Server 1: “I am getting sick of all this serving crap.” Server 2: “I am too. Let’s simultaneously fail right now.” Server 3: “Hey, great idea!” Server 4: “Don’t leave me out!”"
Find me on FriendFeed here, along with fellow VentureBeat writers Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha, Chris Morrison and Dan Kaplan.
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About the Author, MG Siegler
MG Siegler writes about technology trends and new media for VentureBeat, with a focus on mobile topics, social elements and key news stories. Before that, MG wrote about technology on his blog, ParisLemon. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan where he studied film. He's previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where he did web development. He now lives in San Francisco.