It appears as though Facebook has gone down for the count. While there’s no doubt that the site will be up and running in the near future, users around the web (especially on Twitter) are reporting that the site has gone down. Currently we are unable to reach the site and when we try to access it we receive the result pictured below.
Historically, Facebook has been relatively good at keeping the site up and running, however in recent months there has been an increase in downtime. While Facebook is typically good at getting the back to a usable state, we’re not quite sure what the issue is here. Based on a traceroute command it appears that the issue could be a DNS problem with Facebook, something that the company has faced in the past.
Given that over 250 million people log in to the site daily, there is most definitely a lot of people that are not able to access the site at this point in time. We will reach out to Facebook to find out what’s going on, but my guess is they are overwhelmed with inquiries right now. We will update this post when we learn more about the downtime. Are you able to access the site?
Update
While the service hasn’t been functioning for about 5 minutes or so, we’re starting to see some functionality restored. My guess is that this was a DNS bug.
Source: All Facebook
Friday, October 22, 2010