Bebo’s Downtime Increases 10x in January; Developer Platform to Blame?

Web monitoring service Pingdom has some interesting research today on the downtime at social networking service Bebo. While not big in the U.S., Bebo is the 2nd largest social network in the UK and Wikipedia notes that it’s the third largest in the U.S.

In December 2007, Bebo had 30 minutes of downtime. This increased to 320 minutes in January and with only 14 days into February, downtime is at 194 minutes. The interesting thing to note is that in mid-December, Bebo launched their open developer platform. Could the platform be the cause of the additional downtime? Was Bebo not prepared to handle the massive amounts of new traffic and API hits?