I note facebook is down. I checked it on twitter. Twitter is alive with the news. Suddenly occurred to me that it doesn’t matter.

It is interesting, however, to consider that facebook must have a massively reliable platform but still has problems.  It goes to show that you can never achieve 5 nines reliability.

Twitter told me that the problems started at 5 past 6 this morning . It is now nearly 7 o’clock. 5nines is only something like 5 minutes of downtime a year. It’s a good job that facebook isn’t mission critical.

On this occasion twitter is serving as an alternative platform for communication. Its different but its does serve a purpose. Twitter and facebook are the two sites i turn to first thing in the morning. Facebook tells me an unimportant gossip about what my friends have been doing. Twitter tells me what’s going on in the world,  in this case facebook not working. Although that’s stating the bleeding obvious, it is useful to know the other people have the same problem. Nobody wants to be alone!

Dictated from the comfort of my bed whilst listening to radio 4. No mention of facebook on the news funnily enough.

Update 7. 19. It’s made the radio 4 news with rory cellan-jones. Apparently its back up now speculation is that it was a cyber attack.