Facebook Broke the Web

The largest social network in the world briefly broke parts of the web last week, with millions of its members being unable to access various websites. The matter was revealed in a matter of minutes after the users started complaining of the outage: it turned out that Facebook plugins located on thousands of online pages – the ones that allow people to share or recommend articles – appeared to be broken.

The online complaints claimed that Facebook users visiting such sites as Fairfax news services, The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, The Washington Post, CNN and many others were unable to access them. Instead, they were redirected to a Facebook error page which had a message saying “An error occurred. Please try again later”.

In response, the social network has only offered a cryptic comment about the situation, even though the issue appears to be fixed and despite the numerous complaints from its users.

A Facebook representative had to admit that for a short period of time there was a bug redirecting people logging in with Facebook from 3rd party services to Facebook.com. However, he pointed out that the problem in question was resolved quickly enough, so now Login with Facebook should be working as usual.

The problem in question was discussed online by many of the industry experts. They regard it as one of the dangers when Internet users rely on other websites for core functions. For instance, a lot of websites use Facebook Connect whereby instead of creating a new user account Facebook members can quickly log in with their Facebook account. Hopefully, the issue won’t return and users can continue surfing the web.