martinibuster - 10:56 pm on Aug 12, 2009 (gmt 0)

Those are the countries where Facebook revenues aren't keeping up with bandwidth costs. Those countries have been a drag on Facebook's ability to become profitable. The drag was such a big issue internally at Facebook that their Chief Financial Officer resigned because he objected to statements claiming profitability possible by 2010. This is a cost cutting move as part of their struggle to reach profitability.

From an April 2009 NYTimes article about serving countries that don't monetize [nytimes.com]:

The Facebook social network is also considering lowering the quality of videos and photographs delivered to some regions in an effort to reduce expenses. “We can decide, either on a country by country or user by user basis, to engineer the quality of the service for that cohort of users,” said Jonathan Heiliger, the executive who oversees Facebook’s computing infrastructure. Facebook is in a particularly difficult predicament. Seventy percent of its 200 million members live outside the United States, many in regions that do not contribute much to Facebook’s bottom line.