With Facebook having over 500 million registered users, you’d expect the traffic passing through the site every day to be huge. But it’s not until you look at the figures until you realize just how big of a part of the Internet Facebook has become.

Democracy UK, a UK political campaigning initiative, has posted a 20 minute snapshot of activity on the social network. Here’s what the Facebook servers have to deal with over a very short period of time:

Shared links: 1,000,000
Tagged photos: 1,323,000
Event invites sent out: 1,484,000
Wall Posts: 1,587,000
Status updates: 1,851,000
Friend requests accepted: 1,972,000
Photos uploaded: 2,716,000
Comments: 10,208,000
Message: 4,632,000 

Over 10 million comments in 20 minutes is unimaginable to me, and over 2 million photos uploaded in the same period demonstrates Facebook must be fighting a constant battle to keep on top of the storage demands of its every-growing data pool.

Democracy UK also report some other stats including relationship status changes during 2010, and the most liked celebrities. The results of both are shown below: 

43,869,800 changed their status to single
3,025,791 changed their status to “it’s complicated”
28,460,516 changed their status to in a relationship
5,974,574 changed their status to engaged
36,774,801 changes their status to married 

Lady Gaga: 24,712,169 people like this
Eminem: 23,729,700 people like this
Megan Fox: 19,575,080 people like this
Vin Diesel: 19,425,325 people like this
Rihanna: 18,903,844 people like this
Barack Obama: 17,229,885 people like this
Bob Marley: 17,168,034 people like this
Lil Wayne: 17,004,850 people like this
Justin Bieber 16,779,874 people like this
Shakira: 16,520,790 people like this

Type     Private
Founded     Cambridge, Massachusetts (2004)
Founder     Mark Zuckerberg
Eduardo Saverin
Dustin Moskovitz
Chris Hughes
Headquarters     Palo Alto, California, U.S. (main headquarters; serves the Americas)
Dublin, Ireland (headquarters for Europe, Africa, Middle East)
Seoul, South Korea (headquarters for Asia)
Wellington, New Zealand (headquarters for Oceania), Hyderabad, India (Headquarters for South Asia)
Area served     Worldwide
Key people     Mark Zuckerberg (CEO)
Chris Cox (VP of Product)
Sheryl Sandberg (COO)
Revenue     increase US$800 million (2009 est.)
Employees     1700+ (2010)
Website     facebook.com
IPv6 support     Yes, special URL www.v6.facebook.com
Alexa rank     steady 2 (November 2010)

Type of site     Social network service
Advertising     Banner ads, referral marketing, Casual games
Registration     Required
Users     500 million (active in July 2010)

Available in     Multilingual
Launched     February 4, 2004
Current status     Active

Facebook is a social network service and website launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. As of July 2010 Facebook has more than 500 million active users, Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common interest user groups, organized by workplace, school, or college, or other characteristics. The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better. Facebook allows anyone who declares themselves to be at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over.

* February 2010: Facebook acquires Malaysian contact-importing startup Octazen Solutions.
    * April 2, 2010: Facebook announces the acquisition of photo-sharing service called Divvyshot for an undisclosed amount.

    * April 19, 2010: Facebook introduces Community Pages, which are Pages that are populated with articles from Wikipedia.

    * April 21, 2010: Facebook introduces Instant Personalization, starting with Microsoft Docs, Yelp, and Pandora.
    * June 2010: Facebook employees sell shares of the company on SecondMarket at a company valuation of $11.5 billion.
    * September 2010: Facebook receives a letter from Greenpeace containing half a million signatures asking the company to cut its ties to coal based electricity specifically in regards to the Facebook Data center relocation to Prineville, Oregon which obtains power from PacifiCorp.
    * October 1, 2010: The Social Network, a film about the beginnings of Facebook directed by David Fincher is released. The film is met with widespread critical acclaim as well as commercial success; however, Mark Zuckerberg claims the film to be a largely inaccurate account of what happened.
 

You can see why advertisers and Facebook app developers love Facebook. The amount of detailed data being pulled in every minute, let alone every hour or day, is quite staggering. If you have a popular app on Facebook then millions of users will be using it every single minute.

To support this level of activity Facebook must be spending a fortune on data center expansion, energy, and management. It also makes the lack of downtime the social network sees all the more impressive.

Sources : wikipedia,google,bing,geek - .com