Many Facebook users across the globe faced a half an hour outage recently, which may have cost the company an estimated loss of around $500,000.
Facebook is one of the biggest social media websites in the world. The website has an extremely strong base of users that exceeds over a billion. Millions of users who access their Facebook account every day.
However, on Thursday, June 19, Facebook was inaccessible for around half an hour by millions of its fans. A message, which said "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can," appeared on the screens of millions of users who tried to access their Facebook account.
Facebook has not issued an official statement regarding the reason for the outage. However, CNN reached out to Facebook and a company spokesman has admitted to the outage.
"Earlier this morning, we experienced an issue that prevented people from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time," says Iain Waterman, Facebook spokesman. "We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100%. We're sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused."
In Sept. 2010, Facebook observed a 2.5 hour outage. Reports suggest that the latest outage is the longest the website has ever faced after 2010. The 2010 outage also made the company release an official statement apologizing for the inconvenience caused to users.
"The key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition. An automated system for verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed. We apologize again for the site outage, and we want you to know that we take the performance and reliability of Facebook very seriously," per Facebook's statement issued in 2010.
A Forbes report has also calculated the financial implications of the latest outage, which is estimated to be a loss of $500,000.
"The good news for Facebook is the damage shouldn't be too severe, financially. Facebook's first-quarter revenues of $2.5 billion work out to about $1.16 million an hour. So the company only ought to lose around half a million dollars in ad revenue. For a company that has already spent close to $20 billion this year on acquisitions, that's not much of a mosquito bite," per the Forbes report.
Many people visit Facebook several times a day. A small outage may lead to angry customers; however, the good news for Facebook and its users is that the outage is not a regular occurrence.
