Why Facebook keeps going down

The 2010 film The Social Network was almost entirely made up out of whole cloth, but one point made early in the film continues to ring true. Facebook has long had an obsessive focus with keeping the site up no matter what strain its servers were under, out of sheer competitive fear that users who couldn’t access the site would turn elsewhere and never return.

That focus on keeping the site up helped Facebook to be competitive in its early years, when rivals like Twitter were routinely sidelined by melting servers. But this year, well into Facebook’s decade of dominance, things have taken a turn for the worse. In July, the company experienced a day-long outage across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. That followed the company’s...

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