Facebook Outage Caused by Database Glitch
Found on PCWorld on Friday, 24 September 2010
Facebook went offline for the second time in two days yesterday. The Thursday outage--which lasted more than two hours for some users--is a tale of a database control gone awry and illustrates the need for effective testing and change control procedures.
Ultimately, Facebook was forced to shut the site down and take the affected database cluster offline to break the loop.
The Facebook outage was caused by implementing a configuration value on the live Web site without proper testing and validation.
The bad thing about this is that Facebook came back online. I don't even want to imagine how many hours at work were spent in a productive way during that downtime.