First this morning came the ominous report from El Reg at around 8AM that FaceBook was mis-serving pages and allowing users to browse the InBoxes of others. Then, at around 10:15AM, as I was happily surfing the pages of my friends and associates, FaceBook went down. CNET reported at around the same time the site was down for unspecified upgrades.
It would seem logical that these events are connected. Will update this story as it develops here
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11:26AM: login.facebook.com no longer resolves in DNS .. wow, this is a messy way to take it down but guaranteed to work. I’m guessing this is not simply a memcache bug. The FaceBook error page now has nuked my cookie and logged me out, and has been updated slightly with the slightly less enthusiastic: “Facebook is temporarily unavailable. We are working on it…” |
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12:27PM: I’m logged in and back online … other users reporting the same. The tempest appears to have been contained within the teapot. You are now free to resume normal time-wasting. |
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1:12PM: As another blogger reports, this was really the first big stumble by FaceBook. Some are theorizing that it was a proxying issue (memcache?) and/or may be related to the XSS attack vulnerability detailed by Adrienne Felt only a few days ago. My theory is that they took the site down to execute a patch for the attack, but that their migration process was less than graceful. |
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4:30PM: Mashable is now reporting that it was the original mail bug, and not any hack, that caused them to take down the site to address the problem, which was probably the logical thing to do. Of course, a great statement as to the value of FaceBook is the tumult that this hours-long outage has created |
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6:42PM: Scobleizer has reported that it was in fact a code update gone wrong. 3rd party proxies were coughing up other peoples’ data as a result of poor cacheing. He also reposted their official statement (pasted below). |
Coolio. Here’s FaceBook’s official statement:
“This morning, we temporarily took down the Facebook site to fix a bug we identified earlier today. This was not the result of a security breach. Specifically, the bug caused some third party proxy servers to cache otherwise inaccessible content. The result was that an isolated group of users could see some pages that were not intended for them. The site has now been restored and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.â€Â
I think it’s happened again, either that or my computer just sucks. No DNS recognition at all. Been trying for atleast 10 minutes now…
Well I was locked out of my account last night for “maintenance on my account” and then today I also suffered the total lockout, but I’ve found since it’s been back up that some things are still a bit wonky. I had problems uploading photos to groups which kept logging me out. Very annoying, if only I’d been reading your blog I would have known what was going on Ian. Trouble is I only arrived here now via the feed on your FB page!!!!! LOL.
Back up now. I wouldn’t call it a “great facebook blackout”
Time for the other social networks to step it up.
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