Veeam kicks Facebook while it's down

Outages at massive tech firms such as Facebook should be extinct, backup firm claims

Backup and disaster-recovery vendor Veeam has blasted Facebook for its outage this morning, claiming that IT problems at such a huge company should be "rare, if not extinct".

The social network suffered an outage for about 45 minutes this morning due to what it told the BBC was its engineers introducing "a change that affected our configuration systems".

Veeam was quick off the mark to scold the firm.

"This outage is a valuable lesson to any organisation: no matter what your size and resources, even the smallest mistake when implementing changes can result in painful, and expensive, downtime," said Veeam's vice president for north-west Europe Ian Wells.

"Indeed, even if that downtime is only measured in minutes, it could cost the modern, always-on business millions. The simple fact is that it shouldn't have to be this way: in the modern age, there is no reason why changes to IT systems can't be thoroughly tested before implementation, spotting any potential issues before they affect the production environment.

"Considering that enterprises on average suffer application downtime 13 times per year, lasting over 90 minutes each time, the fact that this is Facebook's longest outage since 2010, and lasted less than an hour, gives some comfort. However, for a business with such resources and technology at its disposal, events such as this should be becoming increasingly rare, if not extinct."