Facebook hit 500 million users
Facebook announced yesterday that they had reached 500 million active users on Facebook; that’s half a billion right there! That’s a huge milestone for anyone even an entire country. In light of this, Facebook have tried a little marketing ploy to try and show the nice side of the social media giant. The launched Facebook Stories, an application that will allow you to tell you how Facebook made a difference in your life. Here some examples:
- Ben Saylor, a 17-year-old high school student, who turned to Facebook to organize a community effort to rebuild the Pioneer Playhouse, the oldest outdoor theater in Kentucky, after it was damaged by floods in May.
- Holly Rose, a mother in Phoenix, who credits a friend’s status message telling women to check for breast cancer with her being diagnosed in time to treat the disease. She used Facebook for support during treatment and became a prevention advocate herself.
Yes we know it’s a little bit cheesy but you can be sure a few of those half a billion people will use it and that is still a ton of people. On the more technical side of things, the Facebook engineers now face the task of scaling to accommodate over half a billion people. That’s pretty impressive and it will be interesting to see what they do to manage that; I mean they are already pretty much in unchartered waters when it comes to their hosting infrastructure.
If you wondering what kind of stats they have and what kinda of strain their services take, take a look here:
- 500 million active users
- 100 billion hits per day
- 50 billion photos
- 2 trillion objects cached, with hundreds of millions of requests per second
- 130TB of logs every day
That’s a load of data that needs to be stored, transfered and processed and quite a bit quicker than a person has time to think. That’s why Facebook have a team of engineers and developers behind the entire Facebook platform.
This was posted by Seagyn Davis who has posted 212 items.
