Social media powerhouse Facebook suffered a period of website downtime this morning, leaving its users unable to access their personal news feeds, walls, photos, applications and games.
The website downtime event
The Uptrends website monitoring service first recognized the website’s downtime at around1:15AM EST, which lasted for about 52 minutes in total. During this time, users attempting to reach Facebook via a web browser would only be able to see a default error message stating, “Sorry, something went wrong.”
Unfortunately communication from Facebook to the outside world was limited during this downtime event, which according to the scores of upset Tweets and blog posts, is arguably not the best way to handle a website outage.
So what went wrong?
According to a statement from Facebook posted on Techcrunch, the outage was the result of an internal change that affected the configuration systems.
While we currently don’t know what internal change to the Facebook service could have been, our website monitoring service was able to capture some valuable data that could give us some insight into the situation.
What we know
We know that Facebook went down at around 1:15AM EST, for about 52 minutes.
During that time, our network of 131 global checkpoints continuously monitored Facebook every 5 minutes and confirmed a series of 9 TCP Connection failures, as well as 1 Transaction Navigate Error.
While we can speculate that this internal change caused a network connectivity problem, it remains to be seen whether or not Facebook will announce the full extent and reach of their website downtime event.
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