“Facebook Isn’t Working” becomes the common phrase across the internet and via tweets in what seems to be a “too fast”, “too furious” growth pattern by the site. Chunks of its 500 million users become fed up as Facebook shuts up--the site continues to go down, not be working, and have unannounced outages that are reminiscent of ebay’s previous woes that left the auction site not working.
Facebook technical issues are not new during past weeks. Only two weeks ago on September 23, 2010--and intermittently for users September 24 and 25--Facebook began experiencing severe outage problems. Facebook remains mum on the topic of whether its technical issues are happening to the web site, related to server issues, or whether the company is actually creating those problems itself in instituting any site enhancements. The situation is weird: late September Facebook outages actually returned not just an error message to users, but message that the Facebook web site simply didn’t exist.
The social networking site has grown quickly and brags of its “500 million” users the site’s acquired—however repeated occurrence yesterday where Facebook isn’t working yet again, is leaving even its faithful users frustrated. Much of the frustration may arise from the simple fact that the social networking giant simply refuses to release any information when the site’s been down.
Apparently someone tried to give the company a PR lesson, with Facebook at least uttering a few rounds during this downtime: Facebook spokeswoman Kathleen Loughlin notified The Associated Press just prior to 10 p.m. PDT October 6, 2010 that the company was working on the problem—but didn’t acknowledge when the site first went down for users nor what is prompting the problems. In an email 25 minutes later on October 6, Facebook’s spokeswoman claimed the issue to have been resolved. What’s starting to make users irritated, however, is the company’s lack of address as to what the “problem” or “problems” may be that are leaving the Facebook site unusable.
In what would seem a highly coincidental set of events, the October 6, 2010 Facebook outage and lack of function arrives roughly 12 hours prior to a scheduled company announcement to be made at an invite-only event at the company’s Palo Alto, California, headquarters. Apparently the only announcements Facebook is making remain "in-house".