Facebook Fixed Site By Turning It Off, On Again

Facebook went down for two and a half hours yesterday, its biggest outage in more than four years. The “like” button disappeared from all 350,000 sites with Facebook integration. How did the site’s tech gurus deal with this disaster? The same way your mom solves most of her computer problems: They rebooted.

You can read the entire, technical explanation of what happened in this Facebook blog post, which explains that a system designed to handle errors “ended up causing much more damage than it fixed,” forcing them to “stop all traffic to this database cluster.” But the translation, says the Guardian is simple: “They turned the site off and on again. And it fixed their problem. Literally.” (More Facebook stories.)