"Okay, let me tell you the difference between Facebook and everyone else, we don't crash EVER! If those servers are down for even a day, our entire reputation is irreversibly destroyed!"
Actor Jesse Eisenberg's remark as he played the character of Facebook founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2010's drama Social Network comes to mind as the site experienced technical problems Monday morning which prevented users from updating their status.
As users attempted to post an update, users received messages like this: "there was an error updating your status." This led Facebook to issue a statement explaining the reasons for the errors and its fix.
"Earlier this morning, while performing some network maintenance, we experienced an issue that prevented some users from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time," the statement read. "We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100%."
Fox News referenced a SkyNews article quoting Compuware Corporation director Michael Allen who said that the outage could have terrible consequences.
"This is because many other businesses and websites are connected to Facebook through the integration of its services," Allen said. "For example, Facebook is used to enable people to login to many other sites and applications. Any organization that is seeing errors or slowdowns with their own site or application should check to see if they are relying on Facebook services before they start firefighting, as this might be the cause."
News of the issues surfaced first on Twitter as users complained of not being able to update status, upload photos or like post from friends. Most users experiencing the problem also went to other networks including Tumblr, Instagram, Google+, and Pineterest among others, according to reports.
Currently, Facebook shares more than 100 petabytes (or around 104,857,600 GB) photos at its three U.S. data center in Oregon, North Carolina and Iowa as well as one in Lulea, Sweden.
It's been a shaky year for Facebook since the company went public in May at $38 a share though last week it closed Thursday at $52.21. Monday's hiccup is a wake-up call for many though it has not stopped the site, which has around 700 million daily active users, from growing.
