Many of Facebook’s more than 500 million members were unable to log into the site earlier today between 9pm and 10pm GMT.
According to tech news site Mashable, the outage occured as Facebook began debuting a range of new features, including redesigned brand pages and new photo section.
Apparently, the social networking giant was force to shut down its site as some features which were not quite ready for released were accidentally leaked.
A Facebook spokesperson said, “For a brief period of time, some internal prototypes were accidentally exposed to people externally. As a result, we disable the site for a few minutes. It’s back up, and we apologize for the inconvenience.”
All of you must have experienced Facebook outage yesterday.
The site was completely down. Even the “Like” buttons scattered across the Web were not working, rendering they useless and causing loading error.
The problem, which was apparently due to a glitch in the Facebook’s network’s database software, was so bad that it left Facebook with no choice but shut down the entire site to fix it, according to the company’s official blog post.
“The key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition,” said Robert Johnson, Facebook’s director of software engineering the blog post, “An automated system verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed. The software designed to detect and fix errors backfired, and added to the original problem.
This is one of the worst outage of Facebook, since its inception.
Anyway, the problem is fixed now and most users are happily logged into their account as usual, but most advertisers may be pondering about the loss incurred due to the outage, for which Facebook has not mentioned anything.
On my end, Facebook was unavailable for around 2 hours. What about you?
It’s like you were chosen out of the loser lottery when you tried to open your Facebook account and received a “site maintenance” display. If you were one of the 150,000 unlucky winners you’re probably back at ease since you can log in again. Or aren’t you?
Facebook announced today that the weeklong outage has been repaired yet some of us will find that postings, photos, contacts and personal information may be missing or inaccurate. Missing, where has it gone? Better yet, why the outage? Oh, you mean the technical issue. Well, that explains it all then.
If you’re like me, you look further into the question of “why”. Not that Facebook would explain anything further than” technical issues”. Let’s be honest, the World Wide Web is sort of a life line for many of us. So easily we put our trust into the sites we choose to post our personal information on. We do our banking there, our online shopping, networking, resume posting, vacation planning and well, pretty much anything. You can virtually do anything on the web.
So, it makes you wonder when you see that your Facebook status has reverted from married back to single. Don’t be fooled, everything you post on Facebook, has been saved somewhere in the virtual world. Take it for what it is and be weary of what and how much personal information you release. Even though this outage wrecked havoc on your day to day obsession with Facebook, positively speaking, this is an eye opener and maybe we should thank them for the lesson well learned. All I’m saying is that there is always a positive in a negative, if you know how to look on the bright side.
