Bebo Apologizes For Downtime: “We’re Not Going Anywhere”

When social network Bebo went down on Monday, what seemed like a flood of distraught users concluded that the site must be shutting down, and they took to Twitter to commemorate it. Instead, the downtime turned out to be the result of technical problems.

The site was down for about 20 hours, and now the company is about to post an apology, advertised site-wide through the banner ad above. We’ve obtained a copy — CEO Adam Levin explains that the team was working on some new features and accidentally crashed the site. He also assures users, “We’re not going anywhere.”

Here’s the full post:

Dear Bebo’ers,

As you probably noticed we were out of commission for a while starting on Tuesday. We have been fortunate that in the nearly seven years that Bebo has been in operation, these glitches have been few and far between. Still, we work hard every day to keep the site constantly working and we heard from many of you — loud and clear — how much your lives were affected by the outage. We are both profoundly sorry and profoundly moved by the outpouring of comments on blogs, Twitter and elsewhere.

Once we had everything back up in perfect order, we realized we needed to explain what happened so Nigel from Marketing went back into storage and pulled out the Big Book of Website Excuses (2012 Edition). Among the options considered:

1. “Occupy” protesters took over Bebo.
2. Another internet company was protesting against SOPA/PIPA.
3. Time to get a new server… That Amiga 500 has gone as far as it can go.
4. Huge spike in traffic exceeded our server capacity and brought the site down.
5. Time off for the staff to watch a Harry Potter Marathon on Blu-Ray.
6. Just a publicity stunt to get more attention.
7. Government-mandated program to get users to spend more time outdoors.
8. Too many cute cat photos causes our servers to run out of disk space.
9. New policy: turn the site off one day per week to reduce greenhouse emissions.
10. It was all just a dream.

But in the end, we thought it best to just be honest and tell you the truth: we were working on some new features (pretty cool ones, I might add) and in the process we crashed the site. Embarrassing, but true. And we worked as hard as possible to restore everything as fast as we could. Unfortunately, on a site as complex as Bebo, with as many users, these things take time.

We’re not going anywhere. (And even if we were, we wouldn’t just disappear into the night without even saying thanks, right?) The fact is: Bebo has a fantastic future ahead and we’ve been working on some new things that we’re truly excited about. We can’t wait to share them with you, but of course we’ll be a bit more careful as we roll these things out.

In the meantime, if you haven’t already, check out these comments. Some are funny. Some are touching. Some are frankly kind of mean. But that’s Bebo users in a nutshell, isn’t it?

Lots of luv!

Adam (CEO)