How a Facebook glitch slowed down the Internet

Published June 7, 2012 6:05pm

The disruptions that affected social networking giant Facebook last weekend also slowed down the entire Internet, a tech site reported.

PC World cited findings by Compuware APM, a company that tracks website performance across the Internet, that the service disruptions rippled throughout the Web.

"What we're seeing here is the impact of how interconnected the Web is. We're seeing the difference between the old Web, where your outage would only affect your company, and now, where when large services go down, it has a cascading impact on people who integrate with those companies," Compuware chief technology officer Steve Tack told PCWorld.

Widespread impact

"This outage had an impact across many other sites. It affected sites around the globe," Tack explained.

Tack noted the Facebook "Like" button is on countless websites on the Net.

"That not being available and not performing well caused slowdowns at news and media companies and retail companies and anyone else who takes advantage of that service," Tack said.

Hacktivist group Anonymous had been initially linked to the Facebook slowdown but it denied involvement in the service disruptions.

"Not only did Anonymous NOT attack Facebook, but there was no attack at all... Facebook IT's [sic] were just having a bad day," PC World quoted Anonymous as saying.

Facebook's performance problems

Compuware's analysis of the Facebook event showed performance slowdowns at the top 20 news and top 60 retail sites on the Web at when Facebook was experiencing service problems.

PC World also said load times for web pages at the news sites, typically in the five to 7.5 second range, slowed to 12.5 seconds at the height of the Facebook event.

Load times at the retail sites more than doubled, to 5.7 seconds from around 2.2 seconds.

"Torpid load times were accompanied by performance hits at many websites. At one media site with typical response times in the three to four second range, Compuware showed that the Facebook event caused those times to spike to more than 32 seconds on May 31 and about 15 seconds on June 1," PC World said.

Compuware noted similar sluggishness at a major U.S. retail site that typically has response times of two seconds or less.

During the Facebook event, those times climbed to 29 seconds on May 31 and to 11.6 and more than 5.8 seconds on June 1, it said.

Those kinds of performance hits can cost a Web enterprise money because they become lost eyeballs, PC World said.

"Our research shows that abandonment and people's tolerance for a slow site increases around eight seconds. After that, people go to a competitor or elsewhere," Tack said.

Potential performance issues

Tack noted some websites are aware of the potential performance issues due to integrating a third-party widget such as the "Like" button on their sites.

"If it's not performing well, they'll turn it off so it doesn't impact their site's performance," he said.

On the other hand, there are also third-party browser plug-ins that allow consumers to the same thing as they surf the Web. — TJD, GMA News

Tags: socialmedia, facebook, internet