Have you ever wanted to quickly find out how long your system has been up and running for? Did you come back to a suspiciously empty desktop when you could have sworn you left some apps open and suspect your PC automatically installed some updates and rebooted while you were gone, but couldn’t be sure? Our latest application, uptime, is the answer you’ve been looking for.
Facebook has one of the world’s largest server farms and for good reason – with all that traffic no amount of servers can be considered too much. While Facebook’s uptime is a lot better than many most of the other “Web 2.0” services, we’ve been seeing a lot of maintenance-related downtime recently (see possible reasons below).
You’ve got to hand it to the Facebook team though, they have scaling and uptime perfected down to an art. For instance, when servers are due for updates, the maintenance is performed in a staggered manner, updating one set of servers at a time as attested to by the unavailability of certain Facebook accounts while others can still be accessed.
If your account is on one of he servers being serviced/maintained/upgraded, you’ll see a message like this: