Technology

Facebook's Overnight Outage Cost Them Half a Million Dollars

Early this morning, Facebook experienced a thirty-minute site outage and the Internet nearly died.

By Polly Mosendz
This article is from the archive of our partner .

Early this morning, Facebook experienced a thirty-minute site outage and the Internet nearly died. Facebook has over a billion users worldwide, so an outage of even a half hour can cause mayhem. #FacebookDown started trending on Twitter, and even #brands had time to poke fun at the social media monarch:

This was the longest outage Facebook has experienced since 2010. That outage was caused by "an unfortunate handling of an error condition." (Translation: someone broke something.) Facebook hasn't yet disclosed what caused this morning's incident.

Facebook earns about $1.16 million an hour according to their latest figures, so that's just over half a million in lost ad revenue cash flow for them. Considering they had a $2.5 billion in revenue in the first quarter, we think Zuckerberg won't miss that half million all that much. 

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.