GigaOM

A story in the Times of London asserts that the recent success of Facebook platform had the Palo Alto-based hot social environment scrambling for server space, and had to raise emergency cash in order to support the growth surge. The story certainly caught the attention of bloggers big and small but unfortunately it is not true. We checked with Facebook and here is what they told us:

The Times story is referencing funding information from more than a year ago. Per my comment in the article, Facebook has raised more than $37 million in venture capital to support our growth, including systems operations. We now have several data centers with thousands of servers and, of course, our investors have a stake in the company.

It was hard to believe story to begin with, especially given how much revenues Facebook is pulling in these days. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg wouldn’t let that happen. The man was telling partners what to say (and what not to say) when talking to the press, so he must have enough compute power on tap to throw at whatever the traffic surge brought to the company. Maybe Times was paying too much attention to big problems faced by little companies that built apps for the Facebook Platform.

Bonus link: Ten things I hate about, Facebook via WWD. I call it Facebook Fatigue.