The Facebook Blog

Every day's a good day for taking and sharing photos, but at Facebook, Halloween is the best of all. Our users go all out to capture the zany costumes and freewheeling spirit, typically uploading about 20% more photos than usual during Halloween week. That can include several daily spikes that are more than double normal levels. Last year, we welcomed 124 million photo uploads during that week, and this year we're expecting a lot more.

To handle all that activity, we've added 20% more photo servers and 50% more upload servers to process this year's Halloween traffic. We've also packed in 40 terabytes of additional storage (that's 40,000,000,000,000 bytes). By comparison, the words of all 20 million books in the Library of Congress could be digitized in about 20 terabytes of text. So we're making room for the equivalent of two Libraries of Congress.

The popularity of Facebook's photo application, home of more than 10 billion photos, has compelled us to think big for a while. We calculated that if all our photos were printed out and placed side by side, they would occupy 10,280 square miles. That's bigger than Jamaica. Or, if by some bit of magic you could connect all the pixels of our photos into a very long, one-pixel-wide string, it would stretch from the sun to partway between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. We'd share some more weird statistics, but it's time to find a good costume.