Location-based service Foursquare suffered six hours of downtime Tuesday evening, just a day after overloaded servers stopped check-ins for 11 hours on Monday.
A post on the company’s blog Wednesday morning explains the two outages are related:
“In a nutshell, the same thing happened: an overloaded database, the solution to which again was manually redistributing check-in data to make sure no databases were overburdened and then rebooting the site, which we were finally able to do after nearly six hours of downtime.”
Of interest, Foursquare has pursued an aggressive social media strategy to keep the outages from turning into a public relations disaster. The company is using a effective mix of self-deprecating humor on Twitter, a new blog devoted to status reports as well as tweets from founder Dennis Crowley responding to both consumer and media inquiries.
