Facebook 'fesses to bad hair day

Mullets all round

By John Leyden • Get more from this author

Posted in IT Director, 22nd September 2009 16:08 GMT

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Any users who had trouble logging into Facebook on Monday were far from alone.

The social networking website has confirmed that widespread log-in failures, application access and status message update snags were a problem on Monday - without identifying the source of the snafu - via a statement (below) published late on Monday night.

We’re working as quickly as possible to fix site issues that are causing errors for some of you when you try to log in or access features. We’ll keep you updated as the site returns to normal, and you can learn more at http://www.facebook.com/help.

Site problems in general come from connectivity problems, insufficiently beefy servers or coding problems. Some combination of the three is also possible, as are hacking attacks that flood targeted sites with spurious requests. Facebook recently crossed the 300 million user (or at least profile) mark.

Last month a distributed denial-of-service attack took out Twitter altogether, while degrading the service Facebook was able to offer users. There's no evidence the latest site problems at Facebook are anything to do with hacking attacks.

The status of multiple Web 2.0 websites (Gmail, Hotmail, Twitter, Facebook, Blogger etc.) can be quickly looked up via downrightnow.com, which offers an at-a-glance guide. ®

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