Inside Facebook

As many developers have noticed over the last week, the Hi5 Platform has been suffering repeated downtime. As the Hi5 team shared in a blog post last night, the source of the problem was a technical issue related to the way Hi5 was processing notifications. As a result, Hi5 for a brief period turned off all platform notifications. As Paul Lindner, architect of the Hi5 Platform, wrote:

We underestimated the amount of notifications sent, and the popularity of their use on the site.  At first glance this just meant that posting and browsing notifications were slow.  We didn’t expect that other requests would suffer collateral damage.

However, Hi5 has since restored platform notification service to developers by making some changes to the way notifications work. Specifically, notifications are now processed asynchronously.  In addition, Hi5 instituted the following changes:

• A new notification retention policy removes the oldest notifications from the system (14 day max)
• Only notification REST calls with a token generated in the preceding 4 hours are allowed

Hi5 will be continuing conversations with developers that are using notifications the most.