The Great Facebook Fiasco

I have worked in startup web development and internet marketing teams, and whenever we used to make some content live, it used to go through several approvals. If a wrong content live in the internet that’s alright, until you do a massive advertisement, if it is live in the Social Networks, you are in a trouble. Because it gets shared and again shared, and the viewer ship multiplies over time. By the time you correct it, it would be too late and millions of people would have damned it.

Every small company wants to be perfect. I remember my manager calling me up in the weekends, nervous and worried, because some spelling mistakes were there in the website. I used to correct it immediately. And there used to be a few mistakes, which mostly went un noticed because the audience we were serving was smaller, compared to facebook.

What about the Big Companies? I have seen facebook, google, yahoo, amazon, ebay go weird at times, name any other site, it has at least some mistakes in its content, coding and everything else. This time facebook has crossed the limit, and a huge mistake committed by it caused trouble to thousands of people worldwide. Below is the plot.

I registered for the Hacker’s Cup Qualification Event on Facebook. Like me thousands of other people registered for the event. The event page clearly says – 4 PM on 8th to 4 PM on 11th. It never mentioned the time zone there. The time zone was mentioned in the Description which most of the people did not notice. Now here goes the fiasco – Facebook sent event invitations through its own inbuilt application to the 90K odd participants where the time appears at 4 PM of the respective time zones of the participants.

Actually the time zone is 4 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST) which is 5:30 AM(9th Jan) IST and different other times across the world. People from over 180 countries had joined the event and were logging into the event page when their respective times showed 4 PM on Friday. Today is Friday and I did the same at 4 PM and saw nothing was happening although my event alert in my profile page was showing that the event was happening now!

I had a chat with a few co-participant developers and come to know that 1 guy had cancelled his evening plans with plans to participate in the event. Another guy had taken leave from his work to participate in this event. But the event did not happen at all.

And people are hating Facebook for this:-

Facebook could have checked out a time conversion mechanism in its events application which could have saved them from this silly mistake which created a trouble and wasted time of thousands of developers. So the conclusion is that, even Facebook guys are made of blood and bones and can do mistakes. So all other managers in the world, never compare your guys to Facebook or Google guys, because even they commit mistakes just like your guys do.