Business

Did 'fail fast' break Facebook?

The social media giant helped pioneer fail fast culture. But fail fast also created its weaknesses.

02 September 2019

'Move fast and break things.’ Mark Zuckerberg popularised this philosophy and it adorned the walls of Facebook for a long time. That is, until 2014, when the company shifted to: 'Move fast with stable infrastructure.’ Why? Facebook APIs were taking on over half a billion calls a day – if something broke, even fast, its impact would be widespread across the countless companies that plug into Facebook services.

But culture doesn’t just change because you rotated motivational posters. Nor does such a shift undo the problems you already sit with. The above philosophy has another name – Fail Fast – and this might be at the root of Facebook’s problems today.

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