FourSquare Suffers Two Outages In Two Days

FourSquare issued another round of apologies for a series of outages that shut down the mobile "check-in" app earlier this week.

The mobile location check-in site first suffered more than 11 hours of downtime on Monday, which executives attributed to a database crash, preventing the site's more than three million users from "checking in" to their favorite places between noon EST Monday and midnight.

"It sucked for everyone (including our team—we all check in everyday, too)," said company executives in a blog post Tuesday titled "So, that was a bummer."

"We know how frustrating this was for all of you because many of you told us how much you've come to rely on foursquare when you're out and about. For the 32 of us working here, that's quite humbling. We're really sorry," the company said.

FourSquare executives attributed the outages to a system crash that occurred to overloaded database of stored "check-in" data. Other servers went down after the team went in to fix the problem.

A similar outage occurred for more than six hours Tuesday night.

Subsequently, the company said it had to manually redistribute check-in data to make sure that the databases weren't overloaded, and then undergo a reboot of the system.

FourSquare executives said that while some server functions are still broken, they were attempting to implement measures that would prevent such an outage from occurring again.

"In a nutshell, the same thing happened: an overloaded database," the company said, this time in a Wednesday blog titled "Quite the way to celebrate our 200 millionth check-in."

"We're still working to implement the technical safeguards we outlined yesterday. We have some of those in place, and implementing the remainder is our top priority in the coming days. We're hoping that these changes will help stabilize things going forward."

New York-based FourSquare has risen in popularity since it was launched in 2008 by enabling users to "check-in" at various bars, restaurants or other establishments they frequent. The site was designed to serve as a social networking tool that gives everyone on users' contact lists the ability to know where they are at almost every moment of the day.

The mobile app also lets users earn badges for the number of times they frequent certain businesses, allowing them to move up to higher levels on the site. Thus far, the site has more than 15,000 businesses that offer special deals to users who "check-in" there.