The rising social network Facebook was down this morning for several hours because the site had to fix a rather nasty bug: Some users could see information from other users’ accounts. [The Register has some details.]
In the meantime, addicted users got to taste the first unwelcome signs of withdrawals.
“The Net buckled,” is how Seth Goldstein put it. He is a serial entrepreneur now building applications for Facebook. “People realized how much they depended on fbook,” he said in an instant-message interview, “like AOL when they went down in 96/97.”
Now the site is back up, and a Facebook spokeswoman just sent this release, explaining (um, kind of) the outage:
This morning, we temporarily took down the Facebook site to fix a bug we identified earlier today. This was not the result of a security breach. Specifically, the bug caused some third party proxy servers to cache otherwise inaccessible content. The result was that an isolated group of users could see some pages that were not intended for them. The site has now been restored and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
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7 Comments
Time to switch to a new social networks. Facebook is getting fat in the pants. Let’s all sign-up for ClutterMe.com
Mark from ClutterMe
— markWoah. I thought it was only my FB account or some regional 02114 failure. But apparently it was a true genuine screw-up.¨Temporarily unavailable.¨ Ah! Refresh button on Firefox would do the trick. It didn´t. This is when my mini-panic attack started.
— DavidBut then I realized it was just a stupid web page. Is it?
It is funny how fast this has become news. I guess facebook has done their job. They have weaved themselves into the daily fabric of people’s lives.
Rodney Rumford
— Rodney RumfordBack? I’m still getting the same outage message I was getting yesterday.
— TimIt was up for awhile early this morning but now appears to be down again…guess that the small “bug” that they found yesterday is bigger than they thought…
— DeeHey, it happens - Facebook has been doing a lot of major things to compete with MySpace, and I think they’ve been doing an excellent job. When a site grows so quickly and adds so many new features, encouraging even more new registrants, glitches are bound to happen. It was down for a few hours, we all made it out alive. Let’s all take a deep breath!
— HopeAt first I began to shake. The refresh button mocked me assiduously and I felt my pulse rising. It was at this moment that frisky, my orange kitten, tried to cheer me up. Bad idea. I’ll miss frisky.
— Matt Platt