Updated And Back: Foursquare Outage Puts Users In Location Limbo

Foursquare Down

Last week probably would have been a worse time for Foursquare to suffer a prolonged outage, but Monday’s ongoing problems show that perhaps some of the $50 million it picked up last week needs to go toward more servers or more engineers to trouble-shoot problems.

As outages go, not being able to check into the bar at happy hour ranks pretty low on the list of Internet-related disasters. Still, Foursquare went down right around 3:43 p.m. ET Monday, when the company posted a notice to its corporate status blog acknowledging the problem. About 45 minutes later Foursquare said it had figured out what went wrong and was “hustling to get everything back up and running as soon as possible.” No further updates had been posted as of this writing.

Coming off last week’s announcement that it had raised $50 million in funding and put together a mobile-payments deal with American Express, more and more people are taking a look at the ubiquitous check-in service, which counts 10 million active users. Scaling could be one of Foursquare’s biggest problems over the next year, much the way infrastructure issues threatened to derail Twitter before it really got off the ground until they were fixed.

Updated 3:40 p.m.: Foursquare sounded the all-clear at 6:25 p.m. ET. “The website and app are back but we’re keeping a close eye on things. Thanks for your patience. Resume your check-ins!”

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post