coming up on how do they do it the hundred billion dollar website how does Facebook store the profiles of more than one in seven people on earth Facebook is nothing short of a phenomenon the world's largest social networking site it was valued at over 100 billion dollars and boasts over a billion users but handling the profiles photos and messages of more than 1 in 7 people on the planet calls for technology on a simply staggering scale so how do they do it Northern California home of Facebook invented by Harvard students in 2004 this social networking site lets your friends know what you're doing at the click of a mouse eight years after this company's birth it floated on the stock market with a value of an incredible 104 billion dollars you can tell it was set up by students because in here they do things a bit differently graffiti and touchscreen technology vie for wall space vending machines serve up boxes of tech instead of cans of soda and open bars and video games entertain a staff with an average age of just 26 but this quirky environment seems to work their website has clicked with the world and has been growing at a rate of 100 million new users every six months handling the personal details of that many people is a massive challenge we have one engineer here for every 1 million users on the site we operate at just an unprecedented scale there's no user guide for how this works because no website has ever handled this many visitors before when you've got more users than there are cars in the world one of the biggest problems is storage the storage in your laptop could fit in your hand here they need something bigger in Prineville Oregon the landscape is dominated by a monster data center of 300,000 square feet it's like having a memory chip the size of three football fields and it caused hundreds of millions of dollars to build this is where your information is stored in cutting-edge servers and massive memory banks with data flying between them at the speed of light through over 21 million feet of fiber-optic cable ken Patchett is the general manager when you type in facebook.com your request goes to the open Internet and that internet lands right here and from right here we request from one of the Facebook servers your profile and all the information associated with it our data centers work and compiled all that information and then send it back to you right across the open Internet again and all of that happens in milliseconds if you've ever wanted to visualize the internet then these never-ending rows of servers are a fine illustration some people consider the internet a cloud as if it's floating around in the sky but it's not it's a real physical thing the Internet is a physical building just like this interconnected through miles and miles of fiber and cable all throughout the world and all of these buildings can talk to each other and share data back and forth this place makes a supercomputer look like a pocket calculator they've got 30 megawatts of electricity on tap so they should never run out of power but just like when you forget to back up work on your PC a power failure could be disastrous so just in case huge diesel generators stand by as a backup because a world without social networks would be unimaginable to millions of teenagers in the event we lose main power to the building these generators kick in right away so we've got to keep a real close eye on these guys they generate up to three megawatts where the power each we've got 14 of them on this site all this technology generates an incredible amount of heat without constant cooling these servers would quickly burn out you your computer is cooled by a heat sink not much bigger than a matchbox the facebook computers have this this massive seven room rooftop is a state-of-the-art natural air-conditioning system cool air from the high plains of Oregon is sucked in filtered and mixed with warm air to regulate the temperature a fine mist controls the humidity and the chilled air then sinks to the back of the servers stopping them from overheating finally any excess warm air is pushed out by monster fans hundreds of times bigger than the ones you'll find in your laptop more fans will soon be needed because social networking is beating up almost 600 million online addicts log in every day that's almost twice the population of the United States and the site is still growing to keep up thousands of new servers arrive here daily Tom furlong is in charge of the data centers when I started four and a half years ago we had 27 million users a few thousand servers these days we received thousands of servers on a given day and I you know barely note the event these trucks aren't delivering food they are bringing in more and more computer memory most of us are familiar with gigabytes or even terabytes here they have petabytes we have over a hundred petabytes of photos and videos that are growing every single day and that is a fantastic amount of information that's 100,000 times as much data as the hard drive of a high-end PC coming in every day every server rack contains 500 terabytes that's over 130 billion times more memory than the first Apple personal computer and when a single server goes wrong the job of finding a flickering needle in this digital haystack falls to technicians like David Gaylord and one hard drive has failed and he's sent off to find rack b25 in a labyrinth of humming servers you once he's tracked it down David can replace an entire circuit board in the time it takes to update your status but David and the rest of the technicians have got their work cut out for them nearly 2.5 billion people have internet access worldwide each spending 20% of their online time social networking and uploading hundreds of millions of photos messages and updates every day with all that activity even this gigantic data center is running out of space so construction crews are already working hard to increase capacity but with online activity on this scale they better get a move-on