Foursquare, the popular social media mobile app that lets users explore cities and find friends, went unavailable for the second time in two days. A little over a day ago there was a database error that caused Foursquare to go down for 11 hours. Eventually the issue was discovered and fixed, and Foursquare appeared to have gotten the issue under control. They apologized to their over 3 million users, explained the issue in a technical yet somewhat brief blog post, and also took measures to ensure that issues like this one don’t happen again, or certainly that if there is an issue, that it wouldn’t shut down the entire service. Foursquare also utilized Twitter both during and after the downtime to disseminate information to their users, specifically, what the Foursquare engineers were doing to fix the problem.
However yesterday evening the social media site went down yet again, prompting some debate on whether or not the company behind the app has everything under control. Eventually the website came up again, and Foursquare posted another blog post telling users that it was the same issue causing the downtime, and that although there has been some effort made in the creation of fail-safes to prevent this happening, it will take time to make sure the popular website is safe from unwanted downtime. Fortunately in both cases that the database failed and the site went down, no data was actually lost.
Interestingly, though not too surprisingly, these recent problems have really prompted Foursquare user to voice their opinions regarding the downtime. Many were happy to see the company being honest about what was going on, but some users were frustrated, and vented some of that frustration by commenting about it on the Foursquare blog. Maybe Foursquare is getting too big too quickly? It’s tough to say, but all anyone can do is hope that the social media site has thing better handled this time around, and can keep offering the service to millions of users that made them so popular.
Written by Brennan Mack
