At around 4PM MST today Facebook experienced a 15 minute global outage. The site’s downtime seems to have been caused by a DNS routing issue.

This is the second time in the past 2 weeks that Facebook has experienced this kind of downtime. Coincidentally, Google’s Gmail web application experienced significant downtime today, although the two events are unrelated.

The most interesting thing about this downtime to us is the effect it had on Facebook Login’s traffic. Starting at around 4PM the site’s traffic began to spike, topping out at 2150 concurrent users. Here’s a video from our Google Analytics real time stats dashboard.

This type of traffic would have been impossible to keep up with without the help of CloudFlare, W3 Total Cache, APC Opcode Cache, and a highly optimized webserver. At one main server’s CPU was running at ~400% capacity; guess it’s time for an upgrade.

Were you effected by today’s Facebook outage? If so, leave your comments below.

Video URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjxxp4YyFOA

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