Facebook fell flat on its face last night when the site became inaccessible to vast numbers of users across the net, just hours after Google had pulled off a similar trick.
While Google’s outage early on Monday morning stole most of the headlines, with furious business people taking to Twitter to vent their frustrations, those hoping to make the most of the downtime by doing a little ‘social surfing’ during office hours may have been sorely disappointed. Just hours after Google’s blackout, Facebook suffered a similar outage that meant large numbers of users were left facing the daunting prospect of having to eat their dinner or actually go somewhere without being able to share pictures of it with their friends.
Cue a sudden spate of Twitter trends mentioning “productivity”, and “the Mayans” among many others.
Facebook reportedly went down at 5.45pm EST, apparently due to the social media site making changes to its DNS infrastructure. According a spokesperson, speaking to Mashable:
“That change resulted in some people being temporarily unable to reach the site. We detected and resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100 percent. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
Even now, while Facebook seems to be working normally for me (in Thailand), the website Downforeveryoneorjustme.com still reports that the site is having “possible service trouble”, almost 10 hours after the outage was first reported. Hours earlier, the site carried the message “Huh? http://facebook.com doesn’t look like a site on the interwho.” Curious…
Facebook’s current status, according to downrightnow.comMashable continued that the nature of the outage seemed to be rather sporadic, with users from across nations as far flung as the UK, Brazil, Italy and Indonesia all reporting difficulty in accessing the site, whilst others said that they had no problems at all. The mobile version of the site m.facebook.com seems to have been unaffected by the outage.
