What Caused Facebook Outage?

Today evening, part of the Facebook service went down, causing disruption for users around the globe. Users were either unable to login or experiencing slow loading during the 75 minute outage period. This was one of the most buzzing topic on the internet for the last couple of hours. No official word has been received yet explaining the the causes of the incident. So I have searched around the internet on this issue. What I found is not conclusive but pretty interesting.


Facebook Outage May 2012, Image Credit, The Tech Journal

Before I delve into the technicalities, let’s see some interesting public response on Facebook outage. While surfing around Twitter I found @YourAnonNews saying “Looks like good old Facebook is having packet problems… h yeah… RIP Facebook a new sound of tango down bitches.” Another user named @JohnMikulski posted,”Facebook is currently down. The world’s productivity just increased by 1200%.” Now, thats really funny.

The whole news was so buzzed about and searched that downforeveryoneorjustme.com‘s Facebook site status page went down because of exceeding service quota. A similar service verelo.com’s analysis shows that the site is experiencing service disruptions for 3.0677% of the users. That’s roughly 29.6 million users out of serivce.

Though no official word is out explaining the issue so far, I have found something interesting thing in the Facebook “live status” page. It reads at around 7:05pm today Facebook engineers noticed FBML (Facebook Markup Language) App Outage. After 78 minutes FBML app issue was resolved. It seems that the service disruptions for users might have been caused by the glitch in the FBML. But, the hypothesis also have some loose ends. Because FBML may not be directly linked to Facebook’s login applications. And, given that the FBML will be deprecated on 6 June, 2012 it doesn’t seem realistic that the applications written in FBML will still be handling Facebook’s login functions.

We have to wait to know if the hypothesis is correct or not. If not, then what are the real reasons of the outage. Till then stay tuned.

Source: Hacker News

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Manoj

Manoj Pravakar Saha is an Editor of TheTechJournal. He was one the founding members of TheTechJournal. He was working for the telecom gear-maker Ericsson before joining TheTechJournal team. Manoj searches for meaning in this chaotic world. Find him on Google+.

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