Facebook was down for approximately 20 minutes this afternoon. TechCrunch reported that Facebook lost approximately $22,453 for every minute it was down around the globe. They also noted that since it was peak browsing periods for their Western markets, Facebook possibly lost a little more.
Being the data nerds that we are, we also looked for how much data Facebook lost during that period. According to Facebook, they store about 300 petabytes of data, and take in 600 terabytes of data and 2.5 billion pieces of content per day. They also generate over 2.7 billion likes and 300 million photos per day.
Based on average figures per minute from the data above, Facebook wasn’t able to collect 37.5 million likes, 4.2 pieces of content, and 8.33 terabytes of data in the twenty minutes that it was down. That’s almost the size of all the printed content in the US Library of Congress.
Facebook was back up in 20 minutes, and although it may only seem momentary to you this downtime may have cost Facebook almost $500,000 in revenues and lots of Big Data.