Facebook 'lost' my data

I recently received the following email:

'Unfortunately, the settings that control which email notifications get sent to you were lost. We're sorry for the inconvenience.

To reset your email notification settings, go to:

http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?notifications

Thanks,
The Facebook Team'

Interested to see what the Internet had to say about such a well executed hoax, I visited some search engines to take a look, and discovered it...wasn't.

Yes, seriously, someone with that many data servers (and presumably a whole ton of backups and archives) managed to lose a whole load of data. The O'Reilly blog post about the whole debacle is quite amusing, and I must admit I'm tempted to agree with their overall recommendation:

'It's time to fire the entire engineering staff.

And then go out and find software engineers who understand what the phrases "data redundancy", "system and data backup", and "system failover" actually mean.'

Amazing.