Social network downtime figures revealed

New research has been revealed by Pingdom into how the biggest social networks fared in terms of downtime and uptime in 2008.

According to the report, Facebook, MySpace, Classmates.com, Xanga and Imeem were the five websites that achieved an overall uptime of 99.9 per cent or higher.

One of the biggest downtime incidents of last year was when Friendster went down for 23 hours over the course of three days - something that may have been averted with more reliable web hosting.

Pingdom also highlighted the fact that most social network outages were relatively brief, lasting between five and 30 minutes on average - as is the norm for other types of websites.

"The massive amount of traffic and data that social networks handle pose unique challenges to these sites, challenges that must be met to keep providing a useful and popular service to their users," the company said in its report.

Recent statistics from Compete showed that Facebook overtook MySpace to become the most popular social network in the world between January 2008 and 2009.