How not to handle a system failure: how Facebook lost user accounts

Morning of October 4th (GMT +1): several users found themselves locked out of their Facebook account due to “maintenance”. The message said:

Account Unavailable: Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Nothing strange, Facebook has been giving these error messages now and then lately. October 6th: the number of users locked out grown and despite the large number of emails sent to Facebook, nothing –literally– happened. What happens is that the error message above is displayed and your mails to the support service seems to be sent to the trash bin given that nobody had an answer.

Nowadays Facebook holds a dominant position in the life of nearly everybody. Events are created and coordinated over there and people stay in contact with friends through it just to name a couple of reasons. So being unable to access to your account means not being able to keep up to date to your friend’s parties for example.

What I can’t understand is how a web application as big as Facebook, with some of the smartest engineers of the world can’t recover the profiles of their users. I’m sure they have backups, and I’m sure users’ data is replicated in some way so one server’s failure doesn’t take the whole thing down. And even without this, nearly four days of downtime seems excessive. You know, had it been a mission-critical application with paying customers, they’d now lost a lot of money. Now they just lost my respect.

Thing is that companies I respect explain their failures in a adult and responsible way and they keep you updated on what’s happening when something doesn’t work as expected. But none of this has happened with Facebook. We still don’t know if we’ll ever get our accounts back.

UPDATE Oct 7th: Facebook (finally?) acknowledges some problems with their servers with an official note. Even something as simple as this could have been done four days ago saying: “ehy, we’re aware of the problem, it’ll be fixed within 96 hours” and nobody would have complained.

UPDATE Oct 8th: The story now is on Slashdot. In the meantime, Facebook still hasn’t fixed the issue.

UPDATE Oct 9th: Facebook has updated it login error. Now it says:

We are currently experiencing an extended site maintenance issue that is preventing some users from accessing their accounts or Pages they may administer. Rest assured that your account has not been deleted or compromised. Your original account will be restored as soon as possible so there is no need to create a new one. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience you’ve encountered while attempting to log in to Facebook during this time.

UPDATE OCT 12th: A bunch of people are having their accounts back. Mine is still locked but looks like I can be hopeful now.