Rough morning for Facebook, with a sustained outage and a spotty recovery
Facebook went down for roughly fifteen minutes for seemingly all netizens Friday morning, with company engineers reporting Increased errors/latency on all Platform surfaces” on Facebook’s developer status page. Users who tried to login by desktop got the error message “Sorry, something went wrong.” On mobile it appears as a “Network Error.”
The developer page itself was off and online over the course of the morning, and it’s not entirely clear yet how the outage is affecting third party apps.
[UPDATE: After the developer page recovered, the status bar showing the API response time was off the charts after 8:25 am. It slowed down from an average of 200 millisecond response time to more than a 500 millisecond response time. It's clear that apps using Facebook's API were being hit with the same accessing issue that the site's users were facing.]
Facebook’s API response time skyrocketed after 8:25 am.
When I opened Tinder the app froze in the main menu screen, telling me no users were nearby despite the fact that there had been plenty last time I used it. Coffee Meets Bagel had no problems, neither did Lyft, both of which require Facebook logins.
Left: Tinder appears broken as Facebook goes down // Right: Facebook’s mobile app shows an error screen
The web version of Facebook appeared to be loading for several users as the incident approached the 30-minute mark, but lots of people were still having issues. An informal poll of mobile Facebook app users suggested Android users were having an easier time of accessing the service than iOS users during the outage period.
There’s been no word yet from Facebook as to what could be causing the outage, and I’ll update this if I hear anything formal from the company.
[UPDATE: The company hasn't released an official statement, but a spokesperson told ZDNet, "We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing Facebook. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible."]
[UPDATE: The company posted an update to its developer page saying Facebook engineers are trying to figure out what happened.]
Facebook’s message to developers a few hours after the site went down
The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and a company called Knotch wasted no time using outage as a brand advertising moment.
Facebook may be down, but #Pinterest isn't! Check out all of our new pins, chock full of family activities: pinterest.com/childrensmuseum—
Children's Museum IN (@TCMIndy) August 01, 2014
Welp, since Facebook is down. Why not come chat with us over on Knotch?
#facebookdown
knotch.it http://t.co/n2k5G4A2M0—
Knotch (@KnotchIt) August 01, 2014
Image copyright Julius Kielaitis/Shutterstock.
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