Foursquare and the Fail Whale

Something strange happened to me on my way to work this morning — my low fuel notification came on in the car signaling that it was time to pay for my first post-BP oilpacolypse tank of gas. I zipped into the nearest service station near the highway, started pumping and attempted to check in on Foursquare. After all, this was a new gas station, so I’d get the +5 for a new venue and the +1 for the first stop in the day (as an added bonus, this gas station had no Mayor – one more fill-up and I’d be planning my coronation).

All was going according to plan, until I couldn’t check-in. I was served up the Foursquare version of the Fail Whale:

When I got to work, I pulled up Alexa and checked the historical traffic trends. The pattern between Foursquare outages and Twitter outages at about the same time in their explosive growth was pretty staggering:

In 2007, Twitter experienced approximately 98% uptime (or, to put it another way, roughly 6 full days of downtime). To date, Foursquare has been relatively immune to outages, but this is primarily due to the relatively scaled-back number of users. As of March 2010, Foursquare had 500,000 users, and were adding new users at the rate of about 10,000 per day:

It took Twitter a lot of growing pains before they were able to straighten out their network outage issues. It’s my sincere hope that Foursquare (and really, all location-based app services) can learn from Twitter and ensure reliable uptime. There is a definite future in location-aware advertising/marketing services, and nothing can scare off the n00bs quicker than service downtime.