Okay, let me tell you the difference between Facebook and everyone else, we don't crash EVER! If those servers are down for even a day, our entire reputation is irreversibly destroyed! Users are fickle, Friendster has proved that. Even a few people leaving would reverberate through the entire userbase. The users are interconnected, that is the whole point. College kids are online because their friends are online, and if one domino goes, the other dominos go, don't you get that?
Facebook is just too big and pervasive that such an outage would be treated by its users like an internet outage or a power outage. Once it's back online, everyone will forget.
Yes, it's from "The Social Network". It's a scene where Mark Z. is explaining to Eduardo how important it is that the servers stay up all the time.
Of course it was, as far as I know, ficitonalized in the first place, although it rings true (in context) to some extent. What I wonder is, how much is that true now? That is, how much downtime would FB have to experience for enough users to start leaving, to the point that it might prompt a serious exodus.
