Something went wrong with Facebook. Facebook is down. I just got that message. Looking at Twitter it seems widespread.

Is this news? In one sense it doesn’t matter in the least. Facebook is not mission critical to anyone. If you are a business you surely don’t rely on Facebook, do you? Ok so a few photos may not get posted, a pal might need to wait a bit to see your message etc etc etc. Who cares?

In another sense it matters a lot. We have other parts of our lives that are becoming increasingly dependent on the cloud. Facebook is in the cloud. If the cloud stops working we have a problem, Houston.

trefor.net exists only in the cloud (parties and networking events aside – you can’t drink the cloud). It’s normally a great existence. All our important files are there, our finances are run on a cloud service, our comms, everything. So if the cloud has a problem it can be everyone’s problem.

Now this is a fairly simplistic way of putting it. Facebook is already back on line. It was only unavailable for a few minutes. We don’t know why it was down. Connectivity to a datacentre? Virtualisation problems? Looking at it everything seem to be there. Phew.

As long as the data is not lost it doesn’t matter. We can live with cloud problems as long as they don’t lose everything. That’s when you begin to have real problems.

I started this post thinking I’d come up with some profound statements regarding the need for reliability with apocalyptic visions for when things go wrong. Apocalypse is not now. My wifi still works. I have time left on my Chromebook battery. I think I’ll move on:)