Facebook users discovered it and another Facebook property, Instagram, had become inaccessible around 9am this morning, Wednesday, March 13th.
Downdetector.com, which monitors negative comments about services and websites, showed the impact was being reported across a large portion of the US and Europe in addition to South America and Asia.
A Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to USA TODAY, “We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.”
Facebook page administrators had been experiencing technical challenges over the past couple days leading up to this widespread outage. No word whether those were related.
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Facebook down? Oh be still my hart! Now, if it would only stay down, the world might just get back to actually remembering how to hold a conversation.
Just saying.
Hahahahahaa!!
Hopefully their servers didn’t get wiped “with a cloth or something”?
😂
The Facebook outage is interesting to me because I developed system configuration maintenance software for many years. When I read the Facebook engineering report I had to take a couple deep breaths. I understood exactly what went wrong. Although I don’t think any of my team’s code was ever used by Facebook, they used configuration management algorithms that I could have written. I even patented an algorithm for verifying configuration that could have applied in the case Facebook describes. (My method might have helped, but the problem was in the interaction of systems, not configuration verification, so probably not.)
We should all remember that the massive information systems that we all rely on are the product of humans who make mistakes and trust them only as much as we trust our fellow humans. Engineers try, but they can’t foresee everything. When i read the write up, I said to myself, “Yep. That was waiting to happen.” Something similar happened at Amazon on Christmas Eve maybe ten years ago that messed up Netfllx and marred a few people’s Christmas Eve entertainment, including my family. But I don’t think anyone could have predicted the Facebook issue or prevented something like it from happening eventually. Complex systems interact in ways that no one has a handle on predicting. Facebook will fix this one, but I wouldn’t bet on anything like it ever happening again.
Nevertheless, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Facebook, but that’s another story.