The social network site Bebo has for the last three months been experiencing a trend of increasing downtime. The popular social networking service had only five minutes of downtime in November and 30 minutes in December, but in January that increased to five hours and 20 minutes. Looking at Bebo’s downtime so far in February, the trend seems to be continuing. With less than half of February gone by, they have already had 3 hours and 14 minutes of downtime.

On December 12, Bebo launched their Open Application Platform, based on the one from Facebook, allowing third-party developers access to their service. It is interesting that Bebo’s downtime has increased after this. It could be that the access from third-party applications is putting additional strain on Bebo’s platform, resulting in more downtime for the service.

Bebo is one of the largest social networks in the world, with 40 million users. According to Wikipedia it is the second most popular social network in the UK, and the third most popular in the US, second only to MySpace and Facebook. Hopefully the problems they are having will soon be resolved.