Facebook says it has learned its lesson from a 30-minute outage on June 19 that resulted in a noticeable hit to the social networking site's stock.
"Sorry, something went wrong -- we're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can," stated the error message on the social networking site displayed to its users during the outage.
While it was a much shorter period than the 2.5 hour outage Facebook suffered in 2010, users turned to Twitter to poke fun at Facebook well after the outage had been resolved. Shares of Facebook had climbed to $65.60 on June 18 and dipped to $64.60 when the market opened on Thursday.
While the company still hasn't offered a thorough explanation on what caused the unplanned downtime, Facebook spokesman Jay Nancarrow acknowledged the issue.
"[On June 19, 2014], we ran into an issue while updating the configuration of one of our software systems," stated Nancarrow. "Not long after we made the change, some people started to have trouble accessing Facebook. We quickly spotted and fixed the problem. This doesn't happen often, but when it does we make sure we learn from the experience so we can make Facebook that much more reliable."
Thanks to ad revenue, Facebook reportedly earns $1.16 million an hour. The half hour of downtime costs just shy of $600 million.
Scott Kessler, head of technology sector equity research at S&P Capital IQ, stated the loss of ad dollars due to Facebook downtime will at least cause some advertisers to account for such issues in the future.
"It just reminds folks who are looking at Facebook as an outlet to deploy advertising that as much as this might be a 99.99 percent uptime kind of platform, it's perhaps appropriate at times to account for the possibility of down time," stated Kessler.
The June19 downtime was the worst outage Facebook has encountered in the last four years. The outage the social networking site encountered in 2010 lasted for roughly 2.5 hours and was attributed to a verification tool that overwhelmed Facebook's databases with a large string of queries.
