Facebook Available on the 8th Day!

by David on October 12, 2009

Yes. It took 8 days, but my Facebook account has returned! This “outage” inspired me to write about the perils of Cloud Computing.

Facebook had the courtesy to offer a pop-up apology. Still awaiting an apology in my inbox. Maybe not.

Facebook Apology

I sincerely appreciate the apology. As it turns out, at first glance nothing seems to be missing. I still have all my settings, all my friends, my photos, my videos, etc. No harm, no foul.

Not the same, I’m afraid for the Sidekick T-Mobile Microsoft/Danger users. Data loss was the result of this Cloud Computing server problem. See Network World’s Article: Sidekick users livid over Microsoft server failure.

There is a history of recent outages as a result of server failures, but an outage with data loss is a much more serious problem. These events should remind you to take extra care when turning over your data to a third party and doing computing in the cloud. You had better have your own backup (somewhere else in the cloud, perhaps?)!

If this were not enough, Twitter hiccuped on me today, too!

Twitter Over Capacity

I was beginning to think that I was going to be without connection to my world. Fortunately, the Twitter capacity issue didn’t last very long. And my text message interface didn’t seem to suffer.

Needless to say, I will be checking my mission-critical backups. And now I will also be checking my less critical data, too. I routinely check such things, but this has served as a reminder that my redundancy may need redundancy, too.

Someone report me to the Department of Redundancy Department, okay?

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