February 15th, 2008
Bebo downtime increases tenfold - third-party apps to blame?
Downtime for the social networking site Bebo has increased tenfold from December to January, and continues an upward trend, reports the website monitoring service Pingdom.
According to Pingdom’s official blog:
The popular social networking service had only five minutes of downtime in November and 30 minutes in December, but in January that increased to five hours and 20 minutes. Looking at Bebo’s downtime so far in February, the trend seems to be continuing. With less than half of February gone by, they have already had 3 hours and 14 minutes of downtime.
So what’s to blame? It was in mid December that Bebo rolled out its own developer program (based on Facebook’s APIs), meaning that third-parties can now develop applications for the site. Pingdom, along with Allen Stern (over at CenterNetworks), suggests that Bebo’s increase in downtime and the roll out of its platform are no coincidence. Stern writes: “Was Bebo not prepared to handle the massive amounts of new traffic and API hits?”
I would imagine that a project large enough as a full developer program, coupled with Bebo’s massive traffic, would test any preparation. With OpenGadget OpenSocial around the corner, it will be interesting to see if participating sites hit similar problems, as users rush to install all of those third-party apps.
Steve O'Hear is a London-based consultant, educator, and journalist, focussing on the Internet and all aspects of digital technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
