I don't think it the number of people, I think is the number of hits/per time. Then again, it might be the IT people. Unless you are hitting Facebook every minute, you may not notice any downtime. - W. Kirk Crawford

Something is wrong with Twitter's structure. They need better engineers! - Eugene Teng

Kirk: I totally disagree. Twitter has always been going down, even in the good old days when no one used it. - Robert Scoble

also, how many apps/web services are connecting to and slurping data from twitter compared to facebook? - alphaxion

Facebook may never be "down" per se but it is *frequently* completely unusable. I don't think anyone should be looking to FB as the paragon of reliability. - Kevin Pedraja

alphaxion: that is a big deal, yes, but I can tell you the usage on Facebook is many times higher than for Twitter. Length on site numbers are higher too. Most Twitter users don't even use Twitter and that's provable. - Robert Scoble

Kevin: I'm using both a LOT and I can tell you that it's a rare day I can't get to Facebook but that happens almost every day on Twitter. - Robert Scoble

I have seen facebook down. Not near as much as Twitter. - Dan Krivolavek

I suspect a lot of it has to do with back end architecture. - Eoghann Irving

which means they might not have invested as much into the standard web interface servers. How often does access between the off site services and twitter go down? - alphaxion

I think Facebook was smart and managed it's growth. They're architecture was able to adapt as they grew. I think Twitter would be smart to stop trying to patch the system and build a whole new Twitter 2.0. - ChiliMac

When Facebook was young and only open to college students, it definitely went down. It's just that no one but college students (who didn't care) noticed. Twitter doesn't have that going for it. - Jordan Hofker

money - Richard Hill

Twitter is broken. If they don't build a 2.0 version, sooner or later something better will replace them. - Eugene Teng

Twitter is dead to me. - Dan Krivolavek

Jordan, Twitter is not "young" anymore. That excuse flew the coop a while ago. Their infrastructure is broken, plain and simple. - Chieze Okoye

Richard has a big part of it. Facebook has bought an amazing amount of hardware resources. But they've also hired a lot of quality people and done a lot of quality work to make use of those resources. It all works together. - Todd Hoff

FB may not be 'down' much, but it's been moving like molasses for the last year for me, lite isn't much better. I don't know much about the api traffic for either, but I'd bet twitter has more from that side, just a guess though. - John

I do not know about you Robert, but sometimes Facebook is being a 'biotch' to me and times out at various times of day and nite. Twitter, I believe is going through some huge growing pains. I hope they get bigger pants soon. - Nile Flores

Robert, maybe you get access to the VIP Facebook, but I find that several times a month it will do things like log me out every 2 minutes, won't let me access apps, etc. Sure you can log in and maybe see your feed, but that's about it. - Kevin Pedraja

actually, oddly enough, my GF's profile on facebook is currently telling everyone "sorry this profile is unavailable right now". Looks like they still have issues ;) - alphaxion

I am curious what Twitter does with their time and money. - Kreg Steppe

This might be the result of the launching of the site time... Facebook earlier than Twitter!! - Arijit Das

'cause Twitter only picked up engineers that knew how to write scalable applications with their Summize acquisition - and they've been playing catch-up ever since. - Mike Koss

...because only a tiny fraction of FB's "users" actually use it frequently enough to crash it? just a guess... - .LAG liked that

300 million registered users is really just 30 million concurrent. The 10% rule applies here. But that said. Facebook can support more concurrent users than Twitter because they use concurrent oriented programming inspired by Erlang. - barce from iPhone

One more thing. Most Tech managers believe that it's wrong to switch horses. Neither company believes this load of horse hooey. Facebook just can switch horses faster. - barce from iPhone

People have already settled for Facebook's near real-time activity stream. Twitter will always have a place as a comm channel but the majority of those 300 million FB users are fine with checking in once or twice a day to see what their friends are up to. I would like to see stats on how many stale Twitter accounts there are vs. Facebook. - Dave Evans

It got to do with the frequency of access. People who tweet and are active in tweeting do it all the time. It is not the same with Facebook. - Gokul

Are those respective numbers for 'active within last 30 days'. Registrations are meaningless. That's why LinkedIn is always up. Everyone has an account but no-one actually uses it. - Andy C

how many of these 300 million are actually active ? - Peter Dawson

Don't know about FB but 6 million folk are active daily on Twitter. Source: http://www.mediadeluge.com/post... - Andy C

Facebook is often unusable at certain times of the day. Typically just after everyone gets into the office. It is certainly not a paragon of reliability from the users perspective. And 300 million people don't all access it at once. If they did............no carrier - Gilbert Harding

twitter search has value. fb search? NONE. - Phil Calvin

Good point Phil. - Gilbert Harding

Maybe that IS why facebook should keep out of realtime stuff. It is less hassle to their systems. But I find facebook chat slow and unresponsive :) Neither is perfect... that is good. It means there is much more work to do :) - DC Crowley

I have also found that the real time chat on Facebook is slow. I think they would have similar problems if there were as many developers creating ways to update on facebook. Cluster f#(K -cs ostini - Christopher Scott Ostini

Peter: Facebook says that the 300 million number are people who've logged in over the past month. Most of whom are also active daily. I live with a Facebook addict. She's on it multiple times a day and so are all of her friends. - Robert Scoble

Facebook has smarter engineers at the top that listen to the even smarter engineers at the bottom. - Jesse Stay

.LAG, your reason doesn't fly - over half of those 300 million users log in at least once a day, and that doesn't even include the near 1 million apps that are also hitting Facebook on a regular basis. - Jesse Stay

BTW, I don't see Twitter openly sharing that type of traffic information - kinda makes me wonder about Twitter. - Jesse Stay

And Phil, have you tried Facebook search recently? It is becoming more and more valuable every day. - Jesse Stay

*never* down? http://friendfeed.com/jeffdou... - Jeff (the メガマクダジ of FF)

It may also be a matter of function with scale. Facebook has many functions all of which are more than likely different scalable solutions: photo sharing, chat, etc. Twitter has a much smaller set. When taking 300M users in FB how does that break down to function vs. Twitter. It may be that the concentration around function is higher in Twitter's case than FaceBook. So if FB has say 40 functions (number out of air) and most users use say 10, then it would appear to have better uptime because users are spreadout whereas Twitter may have more per function. Theory since no hard numbers :( - Altan Khendup

Robert, I understand the 'addict' state :)- while on the topic, I thought, I'll share this link to the community http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archive... - Peter Dawson

After this discussion, I have noticed some issues with Facebook. Slow updates. Uploading hiccups. General functionality breaks at times. Of course, I still have access to it. - Paul Puri

I think that's the biggest difference. It's rare for Facebook to be "down". Individual components yes, but not the entire site. With Twitter it tends to be all or nothing. - Eoghann Irving

Yeah, Facebook's architecture is much more modularized. If one thing goes down it doesn't take down everything else. They also have many, many more servers managing it all and a much more mature Memcached backend. That, and they have a much smarter engineering staff managing it all. There are definitely slow spots, but they always correct after a short time, and you never see the entire site down. It's probably the reason Facebook is now profitable and Twitter isn't. - Jesse Stay

I'm also willing to bet Facebook is doing Unit Testing on their launches, where I'm pretty sure Twitter isn't (based on the things that break after launches) - Jesse Stay