Foursquare was down for 15 hours yesterday before coming back to life sometime around midnight. As usual the culprit seems to have been too much success.
This kind of outage is common on Twitter, but the micro-messaging service has never been out for this long of a stretch.
Mark Zuckerberg is notoriously vigilant about preventing these kinds of breakdowns, having seen the disastrous effect that outages had on Friendster.
Still, even Facebook goes dark occasionally. This incident is emabrassing for Foursquare, but won’t damage them permanently unless it becomes a pattern. Hell, if the service is addictive enough, maybe it won’t hurt them. The Twitter fail whale is a pretty common sight, and that hasn’t slowed the company’s growth.
