Facebook goes down for many users
Facebook said some users were briefly unable to access the site because of a technical glitch.
The social networking site with more than one billion users worldwide said on Monday it made a change to its domain name system set-up. The change resulted in some users temporarily not being able to reach the site.
The problem was detected and the site is now fully back.
A DNS acts like a phone book for the Internet – translating a domain name like facebook.com into a number that points to a specific host computer.
Facebook did not say how many users were affected or for how long.
Some technology blogs say the problems lasted about 20 minutes.
Facebook.
This day, a day that will live in infamy, has levied blows at both productivity and procrastination. Earlier today Gmail went down for a solid hour, with Gchat inaccessible for even longer. And now, prior to 6 p.m., as everyone is figuring out how to spend the last few moments of the work day appearing to get something done while actually logging on to fruitless social media sites, Facebook has gone down for some.
Reports started surfacing on Twitter. HuffPo’s Ethan Klapper tweeted that he was having difficulties, which prompted a sea of “me-toos.” Oddly, he tweeted that his coworker, seated next to him, is logging on just fine.
The outage seems to be widespread–enough that “Facebook” is trending in New York, with the majority of tweets being complaints about the service interruption–but not affecting all users. Though this reporter couldn’t access Facebook, other Betabeat reporters could.
Meanwhile, Down for Everyone or Just Me, the web’s trusted tool for site outages, doesn’t even recognize Facebook as a website. “Huh? http://www.facebook.com doesn’t look like a site on the interwho” – it returns. Though perhaps that’s down, too – One follower pointed out that the site isn’t recognizing Google either.
For those who suffered through the Gmail outage Sunday night, there might be another day of horror in store if their Facebook page isn’t working either.
Twitter began to get flooded Monday afternoon with posts about Facebook being down after some users were unable to log in, while others were having difficulty viewing and downloading pictures on the site.
The sporadic Facebook outage began to garner massive attention around 5:45 p.m. EST on Monday, with no specific reason for it known. Nearly half of the reporters at the International Business Times reported their Facebook pages were down with others still had access.
The embarrassment for Facebook comes the same day Instagram launched an update for its site and an app with new photo tools and filters.
Instagram is essentially the picture version of Twitter, but has become quite the competition for Facebook – which owns it – since it has started to gain popularity among social media users.
Many people took to rival Twitter after the Facebook glitch, with many of them poking fun at the fact that Mark Zuckerberg’s website wasn’t running efficiently.
“People saying Facebook’s downtime is the end of the world. Perhaps it’s the beginning of face-to-face communication” – @mattsingley said.
“FB is slowly coming back from their DNS issues, pics/posts may be slow, give time. Or better yet just delete your Facebook account” – @YourAnonNews wrote.
“#FacebookisDown thank goodness for instagram or where else would I post pictures of my dinner” – @myconfusedface tweeted.
“Waiting for the Facebook groups named, ‘I was online whenFacebook went down on 10/12/12” – @ashscott92 said.
“First Facebook now Xbox live, the Internet is slowly dying the world is ending goodbye everyone” – @_kellyyx wrote.