Ever wondered how many servers it would take to serve 300 millions users? Well, the answer comes from Facebook ^[1]. According to Data center knowledge ^[2], Facebook now has 30000 servers, which are supporting their day to day operations.

In addition to that, Facebook logs over 25 Terabytes of data, every day. Yes, you read it right, it is the amount of data logged onto Facebook servers every day. Though the number of servers are definitely huge, Facebook is still behind several other companies, including Google. It is rumored that, Google currently has over 450,000 servers.

Couple of weeks ago, Facebook lost data for over 1,50000 users. This, goes to show that no matter how much firepower you have in your servers, you still need to have a proper backup ^[3] methodology.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg commented ^[4] earlier this week that their data recovery process was a bit slow.

"It’s a very small percentage of our users, but it’s a lot of people. We want them to be able to (access Facebook) every day. We resolved it in about a week and a half. I think that was too slow."

She also said that they are a bit behind, when it has coming to scaling to the number of users that are using their service.

"We are, I promise, doing our best to scale, and our growth means we’re sometimes a little bit behind."

Managing so many servers is definitely not a piece of cake. However, kudos to the engineers maintaining the servers. Considering the amount of users who login and use Facebook everyday, it is definitely a pretty tough job.