Pingdom released a study today showing the downtime it had calculated for 15 different social networks during 2008. While they didn’t cover many of the microblogs we cover here, we thought the study was very interesting and is helpful to see how downtime plagued Twitter last year in comparison to other major networks.
Some key findings, according to Pingdom’s report:
- The only two giants in the test, Facebook and MySpace, recorded very little downtime
- Only 5 social networks maintained an overall uptime of 99.9% or better: Facebook, MySpace, Classmates.com, Xanga, and Imeem
- 84% of Twitter’s downtime happened during the first half of 2008
Overall Uptime: 99.04%
A majority of Twitter’s downtime came in the first half of 2008. Q2 had the most downtime with 48% of all downtime being recorded in that quarter. Downtime was drastically reduced beginning in August and fail whale sightings became much more infrequent.
Montly downtime for Twitter in hours
Overall Uptime: 99.92%
Facebook had 100% uptime in October and December which is quite impressive considering it has over 150 million users. Like Twitter, a majority (68%) of Facebook’s downtime occurred in the first half of 2008. No single continuous outage lasted longer than 25 minutes.
Monthly downtime for Facebook in hours
Methodology
Monitoring was done using Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service. Home pages were loaded (HTML only) every 5 minutes. If the page couldn’t load in 30 seconds or an HTTP response of 404 or 500 was returned, then the site was considered to be down. Downtime had to be confirmed from two different locations, otherwise it didn’t count.
View the full report [pdf]
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