Not two hours after posting a detailed blog entry about why its service failed for the majority of the day yesterday and what the company is doing to prevent further downtime, Foursquare is unavailable to its users.
According to a brief update on the company's new status blog, the same issues that caused yesterday's 11-hour marathon outage are also responsible for today's downtime.
The reason for both outages lies in Foursquare's database management and architecture -- that's not to say Foursquare's systems engineers are doing anything wrong, per se. But scaling is difficult, tricky business, and Foursquare is growing much more rapidly than it has since its inception.
The launch of Facebook Places about one month ago caused the app's new registrations to skyrocket. Shortly after that launch, Foursquare broke through the 3 million users mark.
We sincerely hope this New York-based startup can get its database ducks in a row without losing too much support from its users -- and, of course, without losing any data from checkins.