• TechCrunch et al., Wednesday, October 6, 2010 1:53 PM

What would life be like without Foursquare? The world found out Monday when the location-based social network went down due to technical difficulties -- not atypical for fast-growing startups, but still concerning at a time when Facebook and other rivals would gladly take its place.

Total downtime was around 11 hours all told," reports TechCrunch. "That's not good."

Certainly if Foursquare wants to be the platform for location, addressing both the tech and the communication will be crucial," writes ReadWriteWeb.

Indeed, "The app is facing increasing competition from the social networking giant Facebook, which recently launched a feature called Places that lets its 500 million members 'check in' to locations, much as they can on Foursquare," CNN reports.

"In recent weeks, Foursquare has been updating its app with new features," CNN adds. "Since then, users have reported sporadic trouble checking in, although Monday's was the longest widespread outage."

In its defense, "Although 11 hours is a heck of a lot of downtime, this outage could have been worse," writes Mashable. "At least no checkins or -- god forbid -- users' accounts were lost in the data/shard shuffle."

What's more, "Foursqaure isn't the only one experiencing downtime lately," VentureBeat points out. "Facebook recently had its worst downtime in 4 years when the service was unavailable for 2.5 hours."

Adds TechCrunch: "Foursquare hasn't had issues on that level yet, but as they continue to grow, they could get there without major changes."

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