September 24, 2010
Yesterday Facebook fans were in a frenzy when they were unable to reach the social networking site for two and a half hours. Some users complained of slow or intermittent connections, while others could not reach the site at all.
Facebook apologized to its users for what it called the worst outage in 4 years, explaining the reason for the outage as an invalid update they performed to the persistent copy of a configuration value.
A conflicting report from ABC news claimed the cause of today's problem had not yet been disclosed but the technology blog TechCrunchnoted that the issue also affected Facebook's "Like" button that lives on Web sites across the Internet. TechCrunch also reported that Facebook Connect and Facebook Platform had also been affected.
Facebook also reported that “Engineers are still working on the problem, but say they do not believe a virus or cyber attack was behind the issue that made the website unaccessible and slow for users Thursday afternoon.”
I found the wording in this statement a bit strange. If the site was back up, the engineers would know exactly what had caused the outage. They neither deny or confirm if a cyber attack or virus was at the root of the problem.
Add to that the conflicting reports from Facebook and the oddities noticed by TechCrunch and something is fishy.
Would an invalid update cause the issues reported by TechCrunch, and why would Facebook be performing updates outside of a scheduled maintenance window? Why wouldn't the engineers know exactly what had caused the problem after they had fixed it?
We can only wait and see how Facebook's PR team decides to spin this one.
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