Facebook (
), who is the world’s #1 photo host in addition to its top social network, is assuring members that their photos are safe, after a hard drive failure over the weekend led “10 to 15 percent of already uploaded photos” to render a question mark when viewed.
According to Facebook, photos are being restored as the hard drives are repaired, meaning that they will re-appear as Facebook gets to them, a process that will continue into “early next week.” While that will surely be frustrating for some, keep in mind that Facebook now has more than 10 billion photos hosted across its servers.
It’s good to know that Facebook maintains backups of all your data for situations like this. While hardly in the same league in terms of scale, social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia recently had a similar situation in which data was lost and they were ultimately unable to restore service to users, leaving many users with no trace of their bookmarks.
Meanwhile, it’s also a perfect example of why Facebook was smart to open up their blog to comments. This is the type of issue where users want to vent and express their concerns, and by enabling members to comment, they’re doing just that, and at least creating the illusion of being responsive and transparent (Facebook doesn’t respond to any comments).
So far, more than 2,500 people have “liked” the entry, while 1,000 people have commented, which seems to be the maximum number of comments that the Facebook blog supports.
