Submitted by Barrie Smith on Fri, 24/09/2010 - 13:23
Yesterday evening, social networking giant, Facebook suffered a shutdown which they have described as the worst in four years.
It is thought that around 135 million people were unable to login yesterday evening, between the hours of 19.00 and 21.00 BST.
Facebook stated the "huge disruption" was caused by a software flaw to the site. "Facebook Isnt Working" even became a trending topic during Facebook's downtime.
Facebook is the largest social network on the internet, with over 500 million registered users.
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Comments
Possible PR stunt?
This sort of thing just doesn't happen to Facebook, especially not at a time so close to Twitter grabbing all of the headlines. Call me a skeptic but this is all a little convenient timing is it not, especially when a film on Mark Zuckerberg's life "The Social Network" was released the same day - this incidentally features scenes about how if Facebook goes down for more than 24hrs it would be the end of the social networking site. Irony perhaps? A little too much of an 'unexpected' coincidence? Or simply retaining all of the headlines and publicity back from Twitter's hack - or have you forgotten about that incident already? hmmm ;)
Nick Andrews
Good Call
I think this is a good call - Facebook in the news again - all the coverage about the film etc has been in the back and middle pages so to speak and not that visible - taking the site down to become headline news means that they increase visibility for their (marketing?) film, stories about which would be linked automatically from inside articles as topically related news by most journalists.
If it wasn't for this and the Aaron Greenspan article, I probably wouldn't have heard about the Facebook film.
Something else I considered would be if they found they could be victim to a similar attack that happened on Twitter (though with different syntax explaining why it wasn't picked up on by hackers), and the downtime was to fix this vulnerability.
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