According to a new report (PDF) from uptime monitoring service Pingdom, Facebook and MySpace, the two largest players in the social networking market, had very little downtime in 2008. Twitter, whose iconic Fail Whale adorned the service far too often at the beginning of the year, got its act together and was only down for 12 minutes in December. LinkedIn, on the other hand, saw an increased rate of outages in the course of the year.
Out of the 15 major social networks in Pingdom’s study, only five achieved an uptime of 99.9% or better: Facebook (99.92%), MySpace (99.94%), Classmates.com (99.95%), Xanga (99.95%), and Imeem (99.95%).
Twitter and LinkedIn
Twitter saw 84% of its downtime in the first half of 2008 and suffered no major outages in the second half of the year. Even though Twitter continues its rapid growth, it has clearly managed to gets its infrastructure under control.
The reliability of LinkedIn, however, is slipping. With every new quarter, LinkedIn’s downtime increased. Clearly, LinkedIn’s continuous growth is responsible for some of these outages. In terms of total hours of downtime , LinkedIn’s 45.8 hours were only trumped by Twitter’s 84 hours, though Friendster (43.8 hours) and Reunion.com (41.9 hours) were only marginally better off in 2008.
Other Stats
According to Pingdom, Reunion.com suffered the longest continuous outage, with close to 10 hours on March 29. Facebook’s longest continuous outage only lasted for less than half an hour.
