As Facebook continues to surge in traffic, there is a proportional surge in load on the site’s servers. This week Facebook has been experiencing some reliability issues. Yesterday the site was practically inaccessible for some for a large portion of the day and today the site has faced a reduction in reliability. It’s something that is expected of a rapidly growing site.

With over 10,000 servers running Facebook, ensuring that the site is always online is a substantial feat. Facebook has said that yesterday’s downtime was only for select users but I’ve run tests from California and D.C. and both locations had significant delays. Is it a big deal for Facebook to have delayed ping times or to even be non-responsive? Definitely!

Every minute that the site is down is a lost opportunity for new users. Fortunately, Facebook isn’t known for their extensive downtime. Another problem with Facebook downtime? Millions of users are forced to find something else to do with their “free time”. Now that we’re all used to spending countless hours stalking other people, it’s challenging to come up with other creative uses of our time.

So how do you spend your time when you aren’t on Facebook? Do you visit sites like Twitter and other social media sites when you aren’t on Facebook?