Why is Facebook always broken?

As far as I can tell, Facebook is always broken. Ok, they do seem to struggle on serving users, but a lot of functionality breaks on Facebook every day. I’ve seen no press on this, I guess the vultures are all circling around Twitter.

Here’s some examples over the last 2 months:

  • Today – The category selection tabs in the Application directory broke. They sent you back to the home page.
  • Every week when they update their servers on a Tuesday, the script in my IE browser breaks and I need to restart the browser.
  • When they were rolling out the Chat code in April, there were times where every second page load would get a ‘connection reset’ error.
  • Sometimes login doesn’t work
  • Too often to mention, the API calls will get a Connection Reset
  • The ‘infinite session’ key applications can save and use later often fail in the future for no reason
  • Getting an app into the Application Directory can take forever
  • The new Import for RSS into your Feed seems to not work at all.
  • On one of my apps, Facebook doesn’t always do the right thing for the Google Analytics script and comes to my server to get the urchin.js file if the current directory, causing Routing Errors all over my logs.

Now, when things break, its usually not all the servers, so some apps for some users will be broken, while others will be working just fine. Facebook does tend to fix these things quite quickly, but I’ve seen very little communication about what is broken when its broken.

It’s always exciting in Facebook Land!

Update: Less than an hour after writing this post, Facebook broke CSS stylesheets for apps.

This entry was posted on Fri, 30 May 2008 05:05:00 GMT and Posted in . You can follow any any response to this entry through the Atom feed. You can leave a comment .


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  1. joost baaij 12 days later:

    I hear you! Facebook is horrible. I was tasked to build a facebook app and integrating with them was a complete nightmare. The documentation is not good, calls would not work or change half-way through the project, and then all the confusion that the whole ‘facebook app’ concept brings.

    I have wished many times they would just act like the other kids and not do everything differently. The bizarre thing is that they seem to be the sweethearts and twitter is the bad guy! That’s just the world upside down IMO.

  2. Tom 28 days later:

    The API is currently fairly stable, although with the upcoming redesign, that’s all changing.

    Facebook was down for 2 hours between 5 and 7 am Pacific time on Wednesday. 2 Hours – yet not a peep from the press! This may have only been apps, but that’s 20+% of their traffic, so not trivial.

  3. brent about 1 month later:

    i love pizza and facebook and twitter and gmail

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