The social network Friendster is having a bad couple of days. According to our monitoring, the Friendster website has been unavailable for a total of more than 18 hours since yesterday. As of this writing, the website is completely unreachable and has been so for more than six hours straight.
Downtime Thursday (November 13):
- 5:23 p.m. – 01:28 a.m. (8h 5m)
Downtime Friday (November 14):
- 02:33 a.m. – 02:58 a.m. (5m)
- 08:33 a.m. – 08:53 a.m. (20m)
- 09:08 a.m. – 10:28 a.m. (1h 20m)
- 10:53 a.m. –… (6h and counting…)
The times above are shown in Central European Time. Subtract six hours to get US Eastern Standard Time.
According to NetworkWorld the problem may be caused by a problem with Friendster’s hosting provider, QTS.
UPDATE, Monday, November 17:
The total Friendster website downtime ended up being just under 11 hours on Friday. On Saturday the website was unavailable for another five hours.
After a Sunday without downtime, the website was down again for another 35 minutes early on Monday morning (starting at 01:33 a.m. Central European Time).
Since the problems started last Thursday (November 13), the Friendster website has been unavailable for a total of 23 hours, most of it occurring in just three days (Thursday through Saturday).
UPDATE 2, November 17:
It indeed was an outage at Friendster’s hosting provider that was behind the website’s recent downtime. Friendster has issued a statement and Q&A on its official blog:
Here is the part regarding the actual outage:
As you may have seen, Friendster.com has undergone maintenance at various times over the past few days. Friendster’s unscheduled downtime was due to a power outage at our outsourced data center in Santa Clara, California where Friendster’s servers are co-located along side approximately 50 other companies. As a result, Friendster, as well as a number of other online companies, experienced unscheduled and unavoidable downtime. At this time, Friendster is back online and our team is working quickly to restore everything back to normal.
(We found the statement via Paul McNamara at NWW. Thanks Paul!)
For those interested, Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge has posted indepth information about the data center outage that knocked out Friendster.
The monitoring data in this article comes from the Pingdom uptime monitoring service.
