Facebook Connect Experiences Widespread Outages

Connect Fail Icon If you’re used to interacting with websites through Facebook Connect, it appears as though you can’t access it as of a few minutes ago. Even the platform live status page has gone down completely as well. This is a big crash for Facebook which traditionally is able to maintain at least a portion of their sites functioning. While there are some sites that still are experiencing functionality, it appears that the major sites have all lost Facebook Connect functionality.

Our guess is that Facebook has separate servers for large implementations of Facebook Connect, which is why many of the “smaller” Facebook Connect sites still work. Right now CNN, Yelp, LivingSocial, and many others have lost all Facebook Connect functionality. While I’m sure Facebook is working hard to get things back up and running, a crash of this magnitude is relatively rare for Facebook.

Additionally, ensuring uptime is critical as many large sites rely on Facebook to function properly. One developer we spoke to narrowed the problem down to this bug which claims that Facebook’s stylesheets aren’t loading properly and is in effect blocking Facebook Connect from loading. We’ll be sure to update this post if we hear anything more.