Update: FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit lets everyone know (appropriately on Twitter), “The entire svcolo datacenter lost power. They expect to have it restored in 10min, but it will take at bit to bring up all systems.”
via techcrunch
I love friendfeed, its fast and it barely ever goes down. So I was surprised when I couldn’t reach it today. This downtime is not like twitters, where twitter has issues with its own code, or database or scale or what have you. Twitter is able to show the fail whale because their servers are generally still up.
In this case, it seems friendfeeds datacenter has lost power. The datacenter should have had a primary and secondary power source. The datacenter should also have had backup generators. Since they have been down for a while, I guess those all failed. If not, friendfeed servers take an awful long time to boot up!
Since no servers are running, no fail whale from friendfeed. Its hard when everything fails at the same time, but that's generally what happens. Its a good idea to distribute your servers in different data centers, preferably across the country. If you can afford it, that is.
Update: For those worried about Scoble, I noticed him logging in and out of skype… so he should be ok! :)
Update: Friendfeed servers are up but showing an Internal Server Error… uhoh!
