Facebook says outage was 'worst' in more than four years

Update: 10 p.m. ET:Facebook said Thursday’s outage, which lasted about 2.5 hours, was the “worst outage we’ve had in over four years,” according to Robert Johnson, the site’s director of software engineering. Johnson provides a detailed explanation here, but said basically that “the key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition. An automated system for verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed.”August 2009Tuesdayits story