Facebook DOWN: Users Report Problems With Facebook.com

UPDATE: Facebook has offered more details on the outage, which Facebook says was its worst in four years.

A database problem caused the service issues, which Facebook resolved only by turning off its site. Facebook explains: "The way to stop the feedback cycle was quite painful - we had to stop all traffic to this database cluster, which meant turning off the site."

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UPDATE: Facebook seems to be back up and running! Let us know if you're still having trouble accessing the site.

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Wondering if Facebook is down? It's not just you!

Users have been reporting issues accessing Facebook, and the website DownRightNow reports that a "service disruption" is "likely."

DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com also confirms that Facebook is currently down.

According to DownRightNow, as of 3:30PM ET, the last status change was 51 minutes ago and the "last widespread service disruption" occurred an hour ago.

TechCrunch points out that Facebook's downtime has taken the Internet's Like buttons with it:

This is a problem not just because the site is down, but Facebook’s omnipresent Like button is also completely down, so the entire Internet (or a good percentage of it) is feeling this pain.

This is the second time in two days that Facebook has been experiencing service issues. Yesterday, according to Mashable, problems with a "third party networking provider” caused the disruption.

We'll keep you updated on its status. In the mean time, follow the Twitter feed below for real-time updates on the outage.

UPDATE: Facebook has released the following statement.

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.

UPDATE: AlertSite, a web performance management firm, has contacted The Huffington Post with this statement

Facebook started experiencing problems at around 2:30 PM EST. Between 2:30 PM EST and 3:30 PM EST Facebook only had 38.46% availability with sky high response times of up to 60 seconds from one of our monitoring locations. Over the last hour, AlertSite has recorded errors in all 12 of its monitoring locations throughout the US.

Comments

[mediamarv]

02:41 PM on 09/26/2010

Somehow the expression, "too big to fail" comes to mind.

Apparently it's not true at all!!

[Jeremy Kao]

04:20 AM on 09/26/2010

Phew. I hid in my Bathtub until today. I knew it couldn't have been 2012 already, but how everything progress like crazy, you can never be sure.

[efrallyn]

10:22 PM on 09/25/2010

omg that means we actually have to socialize in person now? the world is coming to an end!

[linaya]

07:30 PM on 09/25/2010

Isn't the problem not that Facebook was down but that people spend so much time on it?
I could so, so easily live without Facebook and Twitter. In fact, I resent it when websites make you "connect" to your various social media accounts before you can even post a f***ing comment somewhere. It's intrusive and it's Big Brotherish. I'm almost ready to unplug from Facebook entirely.

Facebook does not exist so we can make friends, they exist to make money by selling the data they collect there. Your data. And no, I will not post this to Facebook, thank you very much.

[GEM-592]

06:53 PM on 09/25/2010

Let it go down for a month, and let's see where we are then.

[Trevor Schmidt]

05:04 PM on 09/24/2010

Yesterday was terrible.
My Facebook was down and I didn't know what to do, so I did my homework and made love to my girlfriend.
I can't imagine what people did without it?

[mediamarv]

02:45 PM on 09/26/2010

Uh, they made love to your girlfriend while YOU were on FB????

••cymbal crash•••

Thanks, ladies and gentlemen and don't forget to tip the waitresses!!

[winterwilde]

03:30 PM on 09/24/2010

I just deactivated my FACEBOOK account, after acquiring over 500 friends, I realized in actuality I do not have over 500 friends, nor do I actually communicate regularly with the handful of people in my personal life anyway.

Everytime I logged on, somebody from some past phase of my life wanted something. Too much aggravation and not enough pleasure.

[arcanepsyche]

08:45 PM on 09/24/2010

Good story.

[linaya]

07:32 PM on 09/25/2010

Well said! and exactly the point. It's a time waster and aggravating, and all the while we are collecting fake friends like dead insects for a science project, they are gathering data. At least we can make it fun by making it fake data and throwing a wrench into their "accuracy".

[General Armchair]

06:33 AM on 09/26/2010

Hail Eris!

[Mark Jc]

02:20 PM on 09/24/2010

I don't know why this is news... Facebook has continuously had outages since it's inception, although i must admit, it has been working pretty well for a while now until yesterday.. but it is still full of quirks!

[SjayLa]

01:50 PM on 09/24/2010

I was on 10 minutes ago, not a problem for me.

[zenaby56]

01:10 PM on 09/24/2010

Yesterday seemed to be a day of tech glitches for me. And then I went to FB to take a break and they were down. I thought there was something seriously wrong with my magnetic energy.

[chigirl75]

12:37 PM on 09/24/2010

Well yeaterday and last night it was down for me, seems to be okay today....

but you never know.

[J0E1]

10:02 AM on 09/24/2010

This significantly impacted the number of birthday messages I got yesterday lol...

[TN60]

09:29 AM on 09/24/2010

I just got on...no problem

[hackerblaster]

09:22 AM on 09/24/2010

Just go ahead and kill me Facebook! How the hell am I supposed to make friends and yap about my life if FB is down?

[TN60]

09:02 AM on 09/24/2010

Could someone here, that is tech savvy, tell me why I get emails from HP of people answering my comments, and they only work 1 % of the time. Unless I spent time going over page after page to find them, which I don't have time to do. It is the same from the page on HP.

I like to thank those who fan me, and I like to rebut those who don't agree with me.

This is driving me nuts and I don't know what to do about it. Does this happen to everyone?

Thanks in advance.