Quite nearly a billion daily active users, for a start.

facebook is a huge tech company much on the scale of google. People are curious because it's like watching Goliath trip himself and fall down.

As others have mentioned in this post, Facebook is used as a log in for many other websites and services. Whatever your personal feeling is about Facebook, it's an integral aspect of user interaction with websites far outside of its native social network platform. For this reason, the condescending guffaws are out of place.

> What is it about a FB service outage that makes it so important?

829 million daily active users on average in June 2014

Earth population, 7.046 billion (2012)

They have a LOT of users. Any platform supporting that traffic is interesting to see how it fails.

Well for me it's my #1 way of communicating with people. More then email, more than phone. Even job related stuff I've head group message threads open where my and the people I'm working with are uploading .zips of the latest work etc.. Note this is FB's messaging feature, not their "News Feed/Status update" feature.

Sure there are alternatives but it's what I've been using.