At least Twitter has an excuse. Sure, the service was down for a bit today, but they’re playing Musical Chairs in the management room — “Oh, it’s down? Don’t look at me, that’s his job.” Once they got everyone’s role figured out, the service came right back up. Foursquare? Not so much.
Earlier today, the company tweeted: “The servers are overloaded but we’re working on it! We will be back up ASAP. #caseofthemondays” That was six hours ago — yes, six. Since then, no signs of life. The mobile apps are down, the website is down, it’s all down. A half hour ago, the company updated: “Our server team is hard at work, but it looks like we’ll be down for a bit longer. We hate downtime as much as you do! #badcaseofthemondays“
I’ll say.
Downtime is also nothing new for Foursquare, but they have managed to be relatively stable in the past few months despite rapid growth — and new versions of the service rolling out. It would seem that whatever the issue is today, it’s probably some kind of failure in the fall-back systems that led to a total collapse.
This happened to Facebook recently, but they also have several times the engineers of Foursquare to be able to get things back up relatively quickly (about an hour of downtime).
Come on Foursquare, you can do it. I have mayorships to maintain.
Foursquare is a geographical location based social network that incorporates gaming elements. Users share their location with friends by “checking in” via a smartphone app or by text message. Points are awarded for checking in at various venues. Users can connect their Foursquare accounts to their Twitter and Facebook accounts, which can update when a check in is registered. By checking in a certain number of times, or in different locations, users can collect virtual badges. In addition, users...
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