Facebook apologies for widespread service failure

by Steven Mostyn - Sep 24 2010, 05:17

Social networking service Facebook has today issued an official apology after the hugely popular service dropped from the Net in what the site's director of software engineering, Robert Johnson, described as "(the) worst outage we've had in over four years."

According to Facebook, the main contributing aspect in Thursday's outage, which lasted more than 2.5 hours, was an "unfortunate handling of an error condition," whereby an automated system used for verifying configuration values ultimately inflicted more damage than it corrected.

"Today we experienced technical difficulties causing the site to be unavailable for a number of people," a company spokesperson said. "The issue has been resolved and everyone should now have access to Facebook. We apologise for any inconvenience."

Yesterday's more widespread outage was preceded on Wednesday by a number of complaints from users who were reportedly unable to login to the site. However, Facebook insists the two issues were not related.

According to a report by the Associated Press, Facebook users in the United States, South America, and across Europe were affected by Thursday's outage, with the service either functioning at a crawl or completely unavailable.

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