> artificial scarcity Remember, Facebook was running on a PHP backend. Apache spins up an entire _process_ for every HTTP request it receives. Facebook was m

> artificial scarcity Remember, Facebook was running on a PHP backend. Apache spins up an entire _process_ for every HTTP request it receives. Facebook was most likely buying their own hardware. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were running their servers at capacity and dealing with both hardware and software scaling issues. Edit: FB is also an image heavy website, which at the time was considered a heavy website.