location based services Archive

Wow is this bad timing or what! We were the first to report on the downtime experienced by location-based service Foursquare yesterday. The major tech blogs posted about the outage somewhere around 9 hours later. Thanks to Alex at NextWeb for linking to CN on his outage post yesterday afternoon.

Today the Foursquare team posted a very technical explanation of why the site was down for so long yesterday. The downtime was related to their database provider MongoDB and some sort of small, sharp pieces of glass called shards. Apparently the outcome is that every Foursquare user gets two free check-ins at their favorite establishment.

And a CN reader just let us know that the service is down again. Wow and I thought I had bad timing! The new Foursquare status blog has a note that today’s outage is related to yesterday’s outage. Twitter users are once again confused as to handle going outside because they can’t tell the world via Twitter where they are.

All I know is this poor girl seen in the image below has been crying a lot the last day. Let’s hope she starts smiling really soon!

Update: The Foursquare team has posted a recap of what happened with the outage. Seems a lot of it revolves around the database provider they use – MongoDB.

Popular NY-based location-based service Foursquare is currently either down, servers are being upgraded or the service is over capacity depending on how you access the service. Twitter users are noting that they are unable to check in on their mobile devices and are receiving the “over capacity” error message. The Foursquare website shows the message below noting that they are currently upgrading the servers.

The Foursquare support Twitter account notes, “The servers are overloaded but we’re working on it! We will be back up ASAP. #caseofthemondays”.

I know when Twitter is down, we get on the Friendfeed bus. When Facebook is down, we take the train to MySpace. But where do we go when Foursquare is down?

Feel free to report in on how you are spending your time since you can’t currently accumulate badges for being the mayor of your favorite coffee shop or in at least one case, your BFFs car.

Update: 4:20pm Eastern - foursquare.com is still providing the message seen below.

Update 2 – We are hearing from many users (they want to remain anonymous) that they are staying at home until the service is restored. One user called us on our tips hotline noting that it just “isn’t worth going out if you can’t get a badge”.

Update 3: 7:45pm Eastern – Foursquare has been down over 6 hours now. I bought a pack of poster board and some felt – if you want a badge made, leave a comment with the type of badge you would like.