This is a list of 14 of the largest social networks in the world, and how much downtime they have had so far in 2008.
| Social Network | Home page (monitored) | Downtime in 2008 (until Feb 25) |
|---|---|---|
| Bebo | www.bebo.com | 12h 28m |
| Windows Live Spaces | spaces.live.com | 7h 25m |
| Friendster | www.friendster.com | 6h 0m |
| hi5 | www.hi5.com | 5h 5m |
| Reunion.com | www.reunion.com | 2h 55m |
| www.linkedin.com | 4h 0m | |
| Classmates.com | www.classmates.com | 2h 5m |
| www.facebook.com | 1h 35m | |
| Orkut | www.orkut.com | 1h 10m |
| Last.fm | www.last.fm | 1h 10m |
| Xanga | www.xanga.com | 45m |
| MySpace | www.myspace.com | 25m |
| LiveJournal | www.livejournal.com | 10m |
| Yahoo! 360 | 360.yahoo.com | 5m |
As we mentioned in a recent report, Bebo’s downtime has increased significantly lately and has had by far the most downtime of the 14 social networks we monitored for this survey. More than 12 hours of downtime in less than two months is a lot, and it could possibly be caused by the new open application platform that Bebo launched in December, allowing third-party developers access to its platform, Facebook style. It could be putting more strain on Bebo’s systems than they anticipated.
The two giants in the field, MySpace (with 25 minutes of downtime) and Facebook (with one hour and 35 minutes of downtime), can both be considered to be within acceptable limits, especially MySpace.
Social networks, just like any other websites on the internet, will occasionally suffer from downtime, either planned or unplanned. However, social networks have a different type of usage than most websites, with frequent visits from the same user and many page views per visit. Therefore downtime can often be even more noticeable and frustrating to social network users.
A note about the monitoring: All monitoring was done using Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service. If a web page is not reachable, returns an error, or takes longer than 30 seconds to load, it is considered as down. Downtime is always confirmed from two geographically separate locations.
