Facebook Suffers Outage For Second Day In A Row
Thursday's massive Facebook outage, which occurred at 2:30 P.M. EST, lasted around 45 minutes, although site response times were slow for several hours after it was restored.
The massive outage follows on the heels of another, smaller outage Wednesday, which was caused when a third-party networking provider took down the site for several hours. However, the company maintains that the two are unrelated.
To add insult to injury, the Facebook "Like" button, and other links to users' messages and events were also sluggish across the site, even after service was restored in some areas. Facebook admitted in a company blog that it was experiencing "latency issues" with its API.
"We're currently experiencing some site issues causing Facebook to be slow or unavailable for some users. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible," Facebook said in a statement.
According to AlertSite, a Website performance service and vendor, Facebook only had 38 percent availability with 60 second response times.
Meanwhile, until service was restored, frustrated Facebook users overwhelmingly turned to micro-blogging site Twitter to tweet their unhappiness -- a slight irony due to the fact that Twitter itself was the recipient of a massive cross-site scripting attack that bombarded users with pop-ups, rainbow tweets and pornography just two days prior.
The Facebook outage occurred a day after news was leaked that the company's CEO Mark Zuckerberg planned to jump into philanthropy with a $100 million donation to struggling Newark, N.J. public schools. The generous donation comes just a few weeks before the Oct. 1 release of the film "The Social Network," which reportedly paints Zuckerberg in an unflattering light.