With 1.13 billion daily active users (as of September 2016), Facebook is the third-busiest site on the internet, according to Alexa, and has built an extensive infrastructure to support this already massive and still growing user base. The social network was launched in February 2004, initially out of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room at Harvard University using a single server. The company's servers are now housed in numerous gigantic data centers around the world. Facebook has not stopped building new data centers and seeking for new data center sites ever since it launched its first company-built and operated server farm in Prineville, Oregon, in April 2011.
Each data center houses tens of thousands of computer servers, which are networked together and linked to the outside world through fiber optic cables. Every time you share information on Facebook, the servers in these data centers receive the information and distribute it to your network of friends.
