Foursquare’s 11 Hour Downtime Is Unacceptable

I’m going to come straight out and say it.  Foursquare’s 11-hour downtime fiasco in completely unacceptable.  And you know what?  It seems Foursquare agrees.  According to their blog post which explains the downtime, they state, “All told, we were down for about 11 hours, which is unacceptably long.”

Foursquare is currently in a very hot market – location based services.  They cannot afford to be down for 11 hours, it’s too costly, especially when the market their in is so volatile.  If they continue to have downtime and scaling issues, they will fall behind.  It’s that simple.  Especially now that they are competing against Facebook Places.

Even though Facebook recently had some downtime of their own, they have shown to be very reliable over the years with minimal downtime.  Foursquare needs to find a way to scale better and make sure that these database issues (the supposed cause of the 11-hour downtime) don’t happen again.

I love Foursquare, but I have found myself using Facebook Places more now due to reliability issues with Foursquare.  Too often does the app not refresh properly or takes forever to check me in to a particular place.

What do you think?  Does reliability factor into whether or not you use a service?