It’s Friday, which means it’s prime time for making weekend plans with friends on Facebook, or at least enviously reading updates from friends who have weekend plans.
But today, that’s hit a snag.
The Facebook home page has been replaced with an error message saying that something has gone wrong, and users of the company’s mobile apps are similarly unable to get their fix of updates from their social graph. People who want to log into apps with Facebook won’t be able to do so, either.
From the outside, it looks like this is a fairly serious outage.
“We’ve not seen anything on this scale with Facebook before and we’ve been tracking them over a year, at least not something that hit APIs and front end clients too,” APImetrics Founder and CEO David O’Neill said in an email to GeekWire. “It’s manifesting in the APIs as a HTTP-503 which is a code for a temp planned outage, but this doesn’t look planned.”
Update (9:45 AM): A Facebook spokesperson provided the following statement to GeekWire via email: “We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing Facebook. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”
Update (10:05 a.m.): It looks like things are slowly returning to normal for most users. Some people may still be experiencing outages, but the service seems to be coming back online.
Update (10:55 a.m.): Facebook’s service status site for developers says that “traffic and error rates are almost back to normal after a coordinated intervention by our engineering teams.”
Update (11:30 a.m.): A Facebook spokesperson provided the following statement to GeekWire via email: “Earlier this morning, some people had trouble accessing Facebook for a short time. We quickly investigated and have fully restored service for everyone. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.”
So what’s the internet to do? Freak out on Twitter, of course. Here are some of the best tweets about the outage I’ve come across.
see you all on VK ya chumps
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) August 1, 2014
If you work at Facebook, please be sure to buy the devops and IT guys a beer later https://t.co/i4phxHrHhV
— Christina Warren (@film_girl) August 1, 2014
Facebook is down and now I'll never get to see those George Takei pictures my cousin is trying to post.
— Michele (@inthefade) August 1, 2014
Let me help you fill the void:
Which weak "Facebook is down" joke are you? Take this quiz and find out.
— Ed Casey (@edcasey) August 1, 2014
"Now that Facebook is down, how will we waste our time" says everyone ON TWITTER AT THIS VERY MOMENT!
— Kyle Orland (@KyleOrl) August 1, 2014
