Facebook is struggling with “API latency issues,” technical difficulties, according to a statement on the site. “We are actively investigating. We will provide an update when either the issue is resolved or we have an ETA for resolution,” the statement said.
“Today we experienced technical difficulties causing the site to be unavailable for a number of users,” a spokeswoman said in an email. “The issue has been resolved and everyone should now have access to Facebook. We apologize for any inconvenience.” The problem started early Thursday afternoon and was resolved by about 5:30 p.m. ET.
Users attempting to log in were greeted by an Internal Server Error message; the Facebook “Like” button, which is separate from the main Facebook site, also appears to have been affected. “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. This is unrelated to yesterday’s outage,” Facebook reps told Mashable today.
With more than 500 million users, Facebook is the world’s largest social-networking site. On Facebook’s blog for developers, a post said the site was “experiencing latency issues,” or a time delay, with its platform. But some tech observers speculated that the delay on the developers’ platform was unlikely to have been the entire cause of the problem.
The outages come at a time of incredible growth for Facebook. In July, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his site had hit the 500 million user mark. Meanwhile the analytics firm comScore recently announced that American users spent more time on Facebook – 41.1 million minutes – than they did on all Google sites, combined.
Some have even believed that the Facebook login problem was a publicity stunt considering that the The Social Network movie is coming out in just a week. This actually is not the case, as there was a technical glitch in the coding that caused the DNS failure.
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