Facebook Is Down 448
Phil_at_EvilNET writes "Jeff Bertolucci of PC World reports: 'Thousands of Facebook users this afternoon (US Pacific Time) are reporting that the popular social networking site is down. It's unclear when the outage began. PCWorld has not been able to reach Facebook for comment, but Mashable reports the company has confirmed the outage.'"
It's back now (Score:5, Informative)
There was a can't resolve DNS error, but it's fixed now.
Re:Why is this news? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, for one thing it's a mistake by a big technology company, one that we generally like to hate. That's either interesting (because they try very hard to prevent such things with redundancy), or funny (because we don't like them). That makes it post-worthy.
But even if you don't use FB, you were probably effected. Those little FB Like buttons have been spreading around like a contagious pox, but they're built on iframes and javascript. That meant that when FB went down, all the sites with those dynamic little buttons had a page element that basically had to time out to finish rendering. If you put the button at the top of your page, your other javascript may not run until the FB JS either ran or timed out.
Net effect? FB going down slowed down a lot of other sites.
Introducing external dependencies you don't control on top of your business critical process can work out so well for people. I'm sure this kind of thing was considered by everyone during the recent "Let's add a like button" craze.
Don't forget sites where many of their users only login through Facebook Connect. That entire chunk of their user population may have been cut off during the outage.
Re:I'm back in. (Score:1, Informative)
Oh, so you didnt notice all those advertising scripts running in the background on slashtot?
What [privoxy.org] advertising [adblockplus.org] scripts? [noscript.net]