“When Facebook first began with a small group of people using it and no photos or videos to display, the entire service could run on a single server,” said Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook’s vice president of technical operations.
Not so anymore. Facebook doesn’t say how many web servers it uses to power its infrastructure. Technical presentations by Facebook staff suggest that as of June 2010 the company was running at least 60,000 servers in its data centers, up from 30,000 in 2009 and 10,000 back in April 2008.