The Fail Whale ate your Twitter user icon for lunch and now it's too heavy to lift.
(Credit: Twitter)Twitter has been hiccuping all day, it seems. Earlier, some users (myself included) noticed occurrences of the service's notorious "fail whale"--the cartoon that pops up when Twitter's servers are overloaded--and later, some members began to report that their profile pictures had disappeared and were replaced by Twitter's default icon.
As they say at Fark, everybody panic!
Well, not really. Twitter CEO Evan Williams acknowledged the issue, saying "if you're missing your icon/avatar, please excuse -- will be back shortly!" in a Twitter post. As of Monday afternoon, some of them are still MIA, and Twitter hasn't said what the exact issue is. But, from what it sounds like, the avatars are not gone forever.
The irony? I navigated to Williams' profile page shortly after 4 p.m. PT, and his own avatar was down. Maybe it was just for solidarity.
Twitter's outage problems were notorious in its early days, regularly downing its servers and spawning rumors that hardware issues had led to the ouster of one of its top engineers. Major outages are now rare at Twitter.
Update: We wanted to note that the "fail whale" art was created by Yiying Lu.
Considering all the horror stories we hear about photos hosted on Facebook and people, you know, losing their jobs over them, maybe this isn't such a bad thing: The social network acknowledged in a blog post on Sunday evening that 10 percent to 15 percent of the billions of photos it hosts were affected by a storage problem, replaced by a question mark.
But they aren't permanently gone, the post by engineer Evan Priestley insisted. "We've already repaired about one-third of affected photos and expect to complete repairs on another third tonight," he explained. "We still have all your photos because we store them in a way that maintains multiple copies of the data in case of hardware failures like this."
The company still isn't quite sure how the outage happened.
"During an otherwise routine software upgrade on Friday night, we ran into some problems with our photo storage and a few of the hard drives where we store photos apparently failed all at once," Priestley wrote. "We're trying to fully understand what happened, since simultaneous hardware failures like this are rare."
Facebook is no stranger to uptime issues, with minor but noticeable outages hitting the social network as recently as two months ago. This one, however, is different in that it specifically affected the photos hosted on the site, leading some members to grow concerned about mass deletions.
If your photos disappeared over the weekend, they are probably back already. But just to be safe--you really should keep a backup on your hard drive. Really.
Facebook might not be a photo-sharing site, per se, but there are a heck of a lot of pictures uploaded to it.
On Tuesday night, engineer Doug Beaver wrote a blog post announcing that the total count of photos on the site now stands at about 10 billion. The social network announced informally in August that it has hit 100 million active users worldwide.
To compare, the News Corp.-owned Photobucket, which has a real-time ticker of photos uploaded, stood at slightly less than 6.2 billion photos on Wednesday morning. Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, hit 2 billion photos just less than a year ago.
"To celebrate (the photo-hosting milestone), we got a bunch of cupcakes and handed them out to our engineering and operations groups," the post read. "One of our engineers calculated that if we had gotten one cupcake for each of our photos, and lined them up side by side, the line could reach halfway to the moon."
Facebook's popularity may indeed reach the moon, but the news is a bit troubling too. Beaver noted that Facebook stores four sizes of each image, meaning that it has more than 40 billion images stored on its servers. That's a lot of storage space required, and though it's much cheaper than it used to be, hardware simply isn't free.
Facebook reportedly borrowed $100 million in May to cover server costs, and while the company is still pretty much swimming in venture capital, it's not clear that revenues will be up to par with server demands any time soon. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week that the company hopes to be profitable in three years.
Recent rumors of Intel employees signing up for Facebook accounts en masse might not have been totally unfounded: Facebook has chosen to use Intel's Xeon 5400 processor-based servers to deal with its hardware and software demands. Additionally, the two companies have signed an agreement so that Intel can continue to assess how Facebook can stay stable and improve performance.
Facebook will have "thousands" of Xeon servers, a release said.
It's not an earth-shattering announcement by any means, but Intel's pretty psyched. "Intel is excited to engage with Facebook as they are a dynamic force in the evolution of the Internet," Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel's Server Platforms Group, said in Thursday's release. "Facebook's selection of Intel Xeon processors for their next round of infrastructure growth is a testament to the performance, energy efficiency and technology benefits Intel can provide." Translation: it's a big deal for Intel to be able to say it makes the hardware of choice for Silicon Valley's cool kids.
Facebook's not growing quite as fast as it once was, but it's still been expanding steadily and now has over 90 million active users across the globe. With photo- and video-sharing now an essential part of social networks, their server demands can skyrocket--and it was technical difficulties that likely doomed the initial frenzy of growth at social-networking pioneer Friendster, as early execs willingly attest.
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