Facebook Outage Worst in 4 years
PrintYou may have found yourself in a panic yesterday when trying to sign onto Facebook and share with your friends and family what your cat just did, only to find that the social networking service was bugging out. It wasn't something on your end, but what Facebook describes as "the worst outage we've had in over four years."
"The key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition," Facebook explains. "An automated system for verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed.
"The intent of the automated system is to check for configuration values that are invalid in the cache and replace them with updated values from the persistent store. This works well for a transient problem with the cache, but it doesn't work when the persistent store is invalid."
You can read the full explanation here, but the short of it is that Facebook's engineers managed to get a grip on the problem and fix it, but not before the site remained down for about 2.5 hours. During that time, Facebook's 500 million members were unable to access the service, and all those "Like" buttons all over the Web didn't work either, leaving websites that use them with errors.
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FrancesTheMute
September 24, 2010 at 12:19pm
Heh, didn't even know facebook was offline yesterday until just now.
sniggler
September 24, 2010 at 1:28pm
Dammit. Whoever is responsible will have to try harder next time.
Burner27
September 24, 2010 at 11:27am
Facebook being down is problem why now? I like computers and being online as much as the next person but, people need to realize that it's not the end of the world if your favorite website is down. G outside, do something else. Read a book. Play with your friends, etc....
Elric
September 24, 2010 at 9:12am
Actually from the description this sounds like the BEST facebook outage in four years!
Victek
September 24, 2010 at 8:56am
So Facebook was inaccessible for a while? It reminds me of when I lived near a freeway. It was occasionally closed down during snowstorms and the silence and relief were astonishing :-)
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