Downtime 08: LinkedIn and Twitter worst
By Pulkit Sharma

Swedish company Pingdom was founded by Sam Nurmi with “a very strong and narrow focus. That focus lies on covering the uptime monitoring needs of 90% of the companies in the world.”  By all accounts, the technology used by Pingdom provides a quality service to customers in 131 countries. Pingdom is now reporting on the downtime for social networking websites in 2008.

The key findings of the report listing the downtime and associated trends of the top 15 social networking sites in the world (Orkut, while popular in India, does not make it to the top 15 list) are the following:

• Facebook and MySpace, the two “giants” in this test, both had very little downtime in 2008.
• Only 5 social networks managed an overall uptime of 99.9% or better: Facebook (99.92%), MySpace (99.94%), Classmates.com (99.95%), Xanga (99.95%) and Imeem (99.95%). Again, it should be pointed out that Imeem was only monitored from May 9 and onward while the other sites were monitored the entire year.
• The single most massive social network incident in 2008 happened to Friendster. The service had a data center outage in November that caused more than 23 hours of downtime in a time span of less than 3 days. If it weren’t for that incident, Friendster would have placed much better in this survey.
• 84% of Twitter’s downtime happened during the first half of 2008. July and onward has seen a big improvement in site availability for Twitter.
• 77% of LiveJournal’s downtime happened in Q4 of 2008. It is too early to say if this is indicative of a trend or if it was a temporary lapse in uptime due to the service’s migration to a new hosting provider.
• LinkedIn’s downtime has been increasing over the year. Each quarter has seen a larger amount of downtime than the one before it. 63% of its downtime took place during the second half of 20083.

Over a year, downtime adds up. In some cases most of the downtime is caused by a few longer outages, and in some other cases the majority of the downtime comes from brief outages, sometimes only lasting a few minutes each. Brief periods of downtime lasting 5-30 minutes are common among websites, and social networks are no exception.

Despite LinkedIn not been accessible for short periods of time, it has seen substantial growth in membership and activity.