posted on Dec, 5 2012 @ 09:06 AM
As one poster already stated - that the issue could be because the system has you as inactive when you haven't refreshed the page fast enough, so the
next page you visit shows you as offline as the page is accessing outdated information from the database.
Another possibility (and one that seems likely with the recent outtages of the site) is that there's an issue with the replication of data across
their cluster of database servers.
To explain this in more detail, large sites will use multiple servers to serve up data/pages to the site's visitors. There are multiple reasons that
sites use clusters: redundancy in-case one server goes down, and to balance the site's traffic across multiple servers for optimal performance.
Depending on how their load-balancing is configured (fail-over, round-robin, etc) determine how information is distributed to each connection, and
because the information has to be copied to every server in a cluster, there is always a chance that the page you're loading is pulling data from a
database that hasn't had your online status updated from the database server that handled your login.