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Facebook Is Down 448

Posted by timothy from the is-life-without-scrabble-life-at-all? dept.
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.'"
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Facebook Is Down More

Facebook Is Down

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  • Facebook Is Down (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Thursday September 23, 2010 @04:15PM (#33680466) Homepage

    And nothing of value was lost. :-P

    • Re: Facebook Is Down (Score:5, Insightful)

      by newviewmedia.com ( 1137457 ) on Thursday September 23, 2010 @04:31PM (#33680658) Homepage
      In other news worker productivity shot up by 150%

    • Grow up. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by DerekLyons ( 302214 )

      Nothing of value was lost to you maybe. But I've got a news flash, the world doesn't revolve around you.

      I've got a friend nearing the end of a difficult pregnancy and who is approaching labor, and Facebook is her husband's primary way of keeping friends and family updated as to her condition. That may not be important to you, but to a bunch of people scattered all across the world - it's important as hell. We care about our friends and family and staying in touch with them, in good times and bad.

      You may

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by 'Aikanaka ( 581446 )
        does he not know how to send email?

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by DerekLyons ( 302214 )

          He does. But email is not even fractionally as easy or convenient, either for him to send out updates or for us to discuss among ourselves.

      • Re:Grow up. (Score:5, Funny)

        by EdIII ( 1114411 ) on Thursday September 23, 2010 @05:20PM (#33681304)

        Dude, screw her pregnancy man. The kid will come out one way or the other and people will get the news a few days late at best.

        I've got corn that needs harvesting. My cows are bursting with milk, and who is going to feed my fucking chickens?

        Nobody ever thinks of the farmers......

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Score Whore ( 32328 )

        I've got a friend nearing the end of a difficult pregnancy and who is approaching labor, and Facebook is her husband's primary way of keeping friends and family updated as to her condition. That may not be important to you, but to a bunch of people scattered all across the world - it's important as hell. We care about our friends and family and staying in touch with them, in good times and bad.

        I think there are some serious definitional problems here, or perhaps a new generation needs new definitions. But t

      • Re:Grow up. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by RocketRabbit ( 830691 ) on Thursday September 23, 2010 @06:52PM (#33682292)

        What, her Twitter stream isn't enough? How about her email list?

        Relying on Facebook for everything is just stupid, and this should be a lesson to your pregnant friend.

    • Re: Facebook Is Down (Score:4, Insightful)

      by interkin3tic ( 1469267 ) on Thursday September 23, 2010 @05:45PM (#33681612)

      Nothing of hard value was lost, but my mental state really took a nosedive. Honestly, about 6 times I caught myself thinking of status updates relating to facebook being down, wondering why I hadn't changed it, and then realizing that I'm a moron.

      Between that and realizing how pathetically addicted I am to frittering my time away on facebook (as opposed to slashdot) has been so depressing that I think I'm going to go home early and play some videogames. Which won't help, so I'll turn to beer.

      Ah beer, you never give me DNS error messages...

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by MarcQuadra ( 129430 )

        I implemented improperly, beer -can- cause DNS issues.

        Just last night I was trying to get to 'a beer at the pub after work' and ended up at something called 'Swilling Karkov on the street at 1AM with a convicted felon who doesn't speak a lick of English'. The problem even propagated, this morning my boss had a '404 - Employee Not Found' error.

  • Staring at the clock! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kepesk ( 1093871 ) on Thursday September 23, 2010 @04:16PM (#33680480) Homepage
    I can't believe this... Facebook went down so I started working and then I actually finished and now I can't figure out what to do!

    Okay, I'm not quite that bad, but we all know people who are...

  • It's back now (Score:5, Informative)

    by commodore64_love ( 1445365 ) on Thursday September 23, 2010 @04:17PM (#33680482) Journal

    There was a can't resolve DNS error, but it's fixed now.

    • This has happened before - they have a problem with their DNS servers, and the entire site becomes unreachable.

      I gotta wonder who in their right mind sets the TTL of 25 seconds on a major site? What a great way to overload your DNS servers and make your site unreachable when they go down!

    • It's been doing that off and on all afternoon here.

    • Re:It's back now (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mbone ( 558574 ) on Thursday September 23, 2010 @04:46PM (#33680856)

      It was NOT just DNS, as it happened even for IP addresses. There has been a lot of discussion of this over on NANOG - there were http 500 server errors and apparently also some indications of problems with their CDN.

      It's just a WA guess, but I bet some configuration change went wildly wrong.

  • Hahahahaa (Score:5, Funny)

    by arcite ( 661011 ) on Thursday September 23, 2010 @04:17PM (#33680484)
    My plans for world domination are coming to fruition.

  • I'm back in. (Score:5, Funny)

    by drodal ( 1285636 ) on Thursday September 23, 2010 @04:17PM (#33680490) Homepage
    I see a lot of people slamming facebook and social web sites.

    They usually do it on some website, while being social.

    What makes their comments better than ones on facebook.

  • I was just using it and then I came here to see this story and then I loaded it and the wall post I made before I saw this story was on my front page so WTFOMGBBQ

  • Isn't it obvious? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Red Flayer ( 890720 ) on Thursday September 23, 2010 @04:28PM (#33680608) Journal
    And so we see the second (or third) salvo in the great 21st century Sino-American conflict. China has embargoed our proxy off their shore, we have likely responded in a manner as yet unknown.

    But really China? Really? You have to go straight for the jugular and take down Facebook? There will be mass hysteria, cats and dogs will dance the lambada, and blood will rain from the sky now that you've taken down our new national pastime, Facebook.

    /adjusts tinfoil hat to a rakish tilt

    But really, wouldn't that be a good way for China to demonstrate how easily they can mess with us?

  • Inverse Slashdot Effect (Score:5, Funny)

    by ka9dgx ( 72702 ) on Thursday September 23, 2010 @04:28PM (#33680614) Homepage Journal
    For the first time ever... mentioning a site was down on ./ made it come back to life.

    • For the first time ever... mentioning a site was down on ./ made it come back to life.

      /. links to heathy site --> servers crap out

      /. links to broken site --> servers revive

      uh oh...it is gaining sentience...

    • So I see Slashdot stories on my Facebook feed.

      Including the story (on Facebook) of Slashdot commenting that Facebook was down.

      Except that it wasn't (or I wouldn't have seen the story)

      Holy recursive effect!

    • What is this "dotslash" of which you speak?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by martin-boundary ( 547041 )

      For the first time ever... mentioning a site was down on ./ made it come back to life.

      No, it's a zombie! Quick, somebody shoot it in the head before it logs people back in!

  • The smartphone apps never went down as far as I could tell.

  • Websites go down all the time. Amazon has been down from time to time. Why is this new at all, let alone front page news? I shouldn't just blame slashdot though, both yahoo and cnn mention this as well.

    • Re:Why is this news? (Score:5, Informative)

      by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Thursday September 23, 2010 @04:39PM (#33680776) Homepage

      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:Why is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by am 2k ( 217885 ) on Thursday September 23, 2010 @05:48PM (#33681632) Homepage

      Since a few months ago, Facebook has surpassed Google as the website with the most traffic on the web. If #2 Google.com went down, it'd be here as well, so why not #1?

  • Sorry guys ! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 23, 2010 @04:31PM (#33680656)

    It was me, i tripped over the servers cord on my way to the bathroom, ive plugged it back in and pressed the button on the front, hope its ok !!

    mom

  • Only IPv4 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by XanC ( 644172 ) on Thursday September 23, 2010 @04:31PM (#33680662)

    I believe this only affected those of you stuck in the last millennium. http://v6.facebook.com [facebook.com]

  • This is how Zuckerberg is protesting the new Facebook movie- he's keeping everyone from procrastinating, making them all do work. Bastard.

  • Culprit has been identified! (Score:5, Funny)

    by airfoobar ( 1853132 ) on Thursday September 23, 2010 @04:32PM (#33680674)
    http://twitter.com/m_ahmadinejad/status/24007026734 [twitter.com]

    (j/k of course)
  • It's been down a lot lately. Although as others have mentioned, it's up again for me now. It's a shame that it's up again, really, although others have mentioned that too. In fact this whole post is redundant. I really shouldn't push submit but in the grand scheme of things, probably my whole life is redundant, so I guess it fits.

  • I was wondering why (Score:4, Funny)

    by Rooked_One ( 591287 ) on Thursday September 23, 2010 @04:35PM (#33680710) Journal
    my downloads for pr0.... the internets were so fast today.

  • Several iEMP devices were 'tested' today (Score:5, Funny)

    by ChrisKnight ( 16039 ) on Thursday September 23, 2010 @04:38PM (#33680754) Homepage

    As soon as the news story broke that Zuckerberg was richer than Jobs, Apple launched EMP weapons at the Facebook datacenters.

  • Maybe one of the latest commits to Diaspora launched a massive denial of service attack against it :)

    Seriously though, it was down for less than 30 minutes, how is this news?

  • Right, everyone back to myspace.

  • This Just In (Score:5, Funny)

    by tarsi210 ( 70325 ) <[nathan] [at] [nathanpralle.com]> on Thursday September 23, 2010 @04:46PM (#33680862) Homepage Journal
    PALO ALTO, CA -- Millions of Internet users simultaneously threw up their hands in frustration and disgust Thursday afternoon as Facebook.com, a popular website providing distractions from productivity, inter-personal communication services, and a next-generation forum for thousands of misplaced USENET trolls, blinked off the Interwebs in a bright display of sparks and an anti-orgasmic groan.

    Calls to Facebook headquarters were not answered but when the machine picked up, background noises included explosions, people screaming, and a burly man shouting DOS commands in a fierce staccato.

    Authorities were put on alert status and reinforcements were called in to deal with the huge amount of LOLs and WTFs that had begun to pile up at intersections, due to the timing corresponding with the release of teenagers from school and their subsequent activities. Counselors were bracing themselves to deal with the myriad of relationships that have been thrust violently into limbo as users have been unable to hook up, break up, get married, or get "into a relationship" with their BFF.

    Evan Williams, CEO of the popular sister-site Twitter, said in a statement that they were jumping in to help. "We've brought more servers online to deal with the influx of users who need to update their status, complain about a political party, or notify classmates that they are, 'skanky hors'." Williams also noted that they were partnering with TwitPic and other add-on services to ensure that the steady stream of photos of asses, children doing stupid things, and people drinking in semicircles would be preserved.

    Ag secretary Vilsack presented a sober speech Thursday afternoon, lamenting the millions of dollars in crop and animal losses expected from the downtime of Facebook. "We know a lot of virtual farmers out there are hurting, " he stated. "You should know -- we will be here to help you rebuild."

    Meanwhile, during the downtime, researchers discovered a rather large blue space available outside of their houses and middle age housewives were said to be seen in states of ecstasy from a natural phenomenon known as, "sunshine".

  • Your bastion of security and reliability.

  • Although they were referring to the entire Internet, not just Facebook - it seems there's less and less of a difference nowadays.

    http://www.theonion.com/articles/48hour-internet-outage-plunges-nation-into-product,779/ [theonion.com]
  • Kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya;
    Someone's cryin', Lord, kumbaya;
    Someone's singin', Lord, kumbaya;
    Kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya;
    Oh, Lord, kumbaya.
    Kumbaya.

  • ... There's no such thing as too big to fail.

  • A few hours ago, there was a /. post about url redirect issues with facebook, twitter, etc. Many people posted links to nice firefox plugins which would filter some of that. At this point, thousands of people are probably pointing all sorts of interesting script-tweaking plugins at facebook to see what happens.

    Maybe thats what happened?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PhilHibbs ( 4537 )

      Script-tweaking plugins would reduce the load on Facebook, not increase it. And they only work if the link contains the actual URL like Google's do, these tools can't do anything about URL shorteners.

  • People with soul rejoice all over the world.

  • real news story: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pyrocam ( 1219228 ) on Thursday September 23, 2010 @05:00PM (#33681016)
    "facebook is down" makes top news at nerd related news website

  • Facebook is the opposite of email. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by freeze128 ( 544774 ) on Thursday September 23, 2010 @08:57PM (#33683146)
    Whenever the email server crashes at the office, I notice people milling around and talking. You could actually call it "being social". As soon as they all know the server is up, it gets quiet as they return to their email drudgery.

    The Facebook outage has shown the opposite effect. Today was remarkably productive.

    Maybe there could be a combination of the two. We could call it Facemail.

  • I feel a great disturbance in the social networks (Score:4, Funny)

    by w0mprat ( 1317953 ) on Friday September 24, 2010 @05:36AM (#33685182)
    as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

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