General News

Facebook was down yesterday morning for about 2.5 hours. From around 9:30 AM eastern standard time to about 12:00 PM most people reported not being able to access Facebook. Most received a DNS failure message similar to this one:

Service Unavailable – DNS failure

The server is temporarily unable to service your request. Please try again later.

This was Facebook's longest outage in about 4 years and was the result of the database being overwhelmed by requests. This was due to a new software update that handled certain error conditions. The software update incorrectly found an invalid configuration value when someone connected to their Facebook account. This error would result in numerous queries to the database. When you times the number of database queries by the number of people who use Facebook everyday worldwide, this error quickly brought Facebook's database servers to their knees. The problem also compounded itself because, if the same person tried to visit Facebook again, the whole process would start over again.

To fix the problem, Facebook's engineering team had to shut down the site. Once the database servers stopped receiving requests the reason for the problem was discovered and then fixed. Once completed, Facebook then slowly allowed people back on the site and monitored the situation closely. The system that checks for errors in configuration values is turned off at the moment. Engineers are going over new designs for the system to make sure this problem doesn't happen again.

For more details on the problem Facebook experienced, read Robert Johnson Blog.

Features on dating sites come and go quite regularly as the dating companies test the market to find out what their members want. I have been updating a number of reviews recently and notice that Lavalife has removed their online speed dating feature. Lavalife first introduced speed dating last summer and in little over a year it has been removed from the dating site. I guess in the end, not enough singles used speed dating to warrant the feature.

Speed dating may have been removed from Lavalife but the "Online Party" feature has taken over. Online parties are scheduled real-time chatting events that actually have a lot in common with speed dating. With speed dating you are required to chat one-on-one with every single member at the event and then tell Lavalife if you wanted to communicate further with anyone. With the Lavalife online party, you can pick and choose who you want to enter a private chat with.

To find out more about this dating site, read our review of Lavalife.

Here is a small bit of news regarding Zoosk.

According to the WSJ, Zoosk.com plans later this year to start matching singles based on their tastes in music, movies and books. This update to the matching system is in response to a survey Zoosk did of its members that found 57 percent of people found it a turn-on if someone else liked the same books as they did. Zoosk also confirmed that common shared interests like those of movies, music and books are great topics for initiating a conversation.

To find out more about this dating site, you can check out our review of Zoosk.com.

Craigslist has had major problems in the past with their adult services section (see Story). On September 4th they temporarily suspended all sex ads on Craigslist (see Story). On September 15th:

Craigslist told the House Judiciary Committee today that it had closed its sex ads section forever.

The reason for Craigslist backing down on having an adult services section is the mounting bad press from the media and pressure from a number of state attorney generals. Closing this section down is estimated to cost Craigslist $44 million per year. The company held nearly 70% of all sex ad revenue which totaled $63 million.

This leaves a giant hole in the sex ad industry in which I am sure Craigslist competitors will fight over to fill. I expect to see a lot more affair dating site and sugar daddy dating site advertising coming to a website near you.

To find out about this classifieds site, please read our review of Craigslist.

For those of you worried about using Twitter because of the strange messages and internet browser pop ups when you visited the social network early this morning, everything now seems to be back to normal. Twitter has reported that they have fixed the problem.

The hackers used an exploit found in Twitter's XXS (cross site scripting) that allowed them to insert their own scripts. As of 9:50 AM EST this morning Twitter has fully patched this exploit.

If you are still worried about potential problems by using Twitters web interface for viewing and sending Tweets, you can use a third party tool like Tweet Deck for extra security.

For more on this story you can read this New York Times blog.

eHarmony has recently set up an International Dating page on their eHarmony dating sites. You can now find links to all of the dating sites they own (or partially own) under the eHarmony and eDarling brands.

As of September 2010, there are 4 eHarmony dating sites, all are in English:

1. eHarmony USA (eHarmony.com)
2. eHarmony Canada (eHarmony.ca)
3. eHarmony U.K. (eHarmony.co.uk)
4. eHarmony Australia (eHarmony.com.au)