Facebook facing fall-down issues

Facebook is having a bit of a wobbly morning - the site is unavailable for many, and working very, very slowly for others. Emails to the Reg suggest it has been having problems for at least three hours. It is not clear if there is a security problem or something has gone wrong with the site's ever-growing infrastructure. …

[Anonymous Coward]

GUFFAW

"Facebook has been claiming it is strengthening its security procedures. Anyone logging onto the site in recent weeks will have seen a message asking for additional email addresses and mobile phone numbers - apparently for security purposes, not in a cheeky attempt to get its hands on what's left of your private data."

GUFFAW HOWL BUHAHAHA...

Facebook-security..Oxymoron..

[Thomas 18]

Facebook - security :

Ultramoron

[Anonymous Coward]

It's mass exodus from MySpace

Co-inki-dence?

[John 62]

mass exodus from MySpace?

all three users then?

[Andrew Ed]

mass exodus

Isn't an exodus a mass movement of people, in which case what is a mass exodus?

[Version 1.0]

Mass Exodus

Three people from Mississippi?

[Daniel Evans]

Mass Exodus

An exodus of rather large people, perhaps?

[Anonymous Coward]

BT/ADSL issue?

Works fine on a Virgin cable account, but is slow as hell on a BT ADSL account, form my tests

[Anonymous Coward]

BT DNS issue?

lots of customers this week with DNS issues who are BT Customers...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: BT ADSL

Hmm yeah must just be a BT fail issue, connects like crap from work, remote in to home works fine on my Orange ADSL :D

[Elmer Phud]

Anyone?

"Anyone logging onto the site in recent weeks will have seen a message asking for additional email addresses and mobile phone numbers "

Either I've not seen it or just ignored it.

It did tell me I'd got a weak password* but, just the once.

*Any decent system would have told me to bugger off and use a 'real' password

[Alastair 7]

Why?

"Any decent system would have told me to bugger off and use a 'real' password"

Why? It's your fault. If it has warned you that your password is insecure and you didn't change it, I don't see why that's Facebook (or any site)'s problem. They're not in the business of making it harder for you to use the site.

[Oli 1]

Title

How the hell am i supposed to tell the world i am currently sitting at my desk, pressing F5 a lot, whilst waiting for the kettle to boil!

Paris, because she loves a bit of downtime

[Keith 21]

Solution

Use twatter instead, although your message would drown i a sea of billions of other equally inconsequential updates, alas.

Twatter - where people with nothing to say say it often.

[Shaun Roe]

glitches in switzerland

its verrrry slow to upload messages here in sunny Geneva

[Paul Hates Handles]

Who also thought...

...their IT dept had finally blocked facebook at their workplace?

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news

work levels have spiked this morning - however it has yet to be determined whether productivity went up or down

[Joe Montana]

IPv6 works fine...

Regular IPv4 facebook is very slow for me, and often times out...

The IPv6 version - www.v6.facebook.com on the other hand works just fine.

[david 63]

Up and down....

...like a whore's drawers.

Not sure it is DNS. Tracert finds 69.63.189.26 every time

[georgejisho]

continuing facebook problems

@ 12:48 UK Facebook freezes and does not load on Safari/Mac - all links on the search page freeze at the same time

[The Fuzzy Wotnot]

Facebook site is not working very well

This is a solution to a problem, not a problem in itself!

[nickrw]

Additional email addresses

Multiple attack vectors, no? I'll keep my single unique-to-facebook email address kthx.

[V 2]

Oh dear...

what a shame.

what will the vapid massesd do now?

[Sarah Bee]

Re: Oh dear...

Comment on The Register, maybe?

[Ian Ferguson]

"I like this"

"I like this"

[Anonymous Coward]

I like this

and I'm currently picking the fluff out of my belly button.

[Volker Hett]

Re: Re: Oh dear...

Why is the Reg better than Facebook?

Here we have a dislike button without trojans!

[moggsta]

problems

i have been trying for about 4 hours to get on facebook but with no joy...funnily enough though u can visit the blog page : http://blog.facebook.com/ and that will have ur messages and posts bar at the top?

[moggsta]

moggsta

and from there i have managed to get to my profile and all is working good now :) very strange??

[Mark Serlin]

It's only facebook

so get over it.

[Wize]

I wonder how long till...

...Anonymous claim to have DDOSed it as someone posted an anti Assange comment.

[ursus]

BT Fail?

Changed my DNS settings to point to OpenDNS servers rather than BT's and get an immediate connection........

[Anonymous Coward]

What a relief!

When I first tried to connect to facebook and couldn't I was annoyed... but I have since washed the dishes, put a load in the washer, hoovered, made lunch, re-organsied the office and took the dog out for a walk. I have also made a start on revision I should have started days ago. I do not think it would be such a bad thing if that hoax about facebook closing in March was true afterall! We would all live our lives again!

[Anonymous Coward]

Chinese hackers

clearly their fault. Give up your freedoms to fix the problem.

[tim-e]

Freedom

Why do you hate freedom?

[Anonymous Coward]

News flash: World productivity increases ten fold!

As per the title. So what, Facebook is down. Get back to work you hippy!

[LiteWeight72]

It's been acting up since...

... yesterday lunch time for me. And it's regardless of how I connect.

iPhone app, iPhone Opera browser, Firefox on laptop or firefox at work.

I blame those pesky kids...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, are people still using facebook

That was so last year.

[SharkNose]

Strange results...

iPhone FB app on an O2 iphone works fine, trying to access FB via Safari from Mac using an O2 3G dongle doesn't, would assume the DNS would be the same for both...

[Jess--]

never assume

never assume (I'm sure you know the rest of that saying)

o2 spilit the iphone off from the rest of their 3g infrastructure a couple of years ago (almost as soon as the iphone 3g came out) as a result it uses different gateways and dns servers to other 3g devices.

the only time it will use the same dns & gateway is if you enable tethering (and pay for the privilege)

using the different gateway & dns allows O2 a simple method of knowing how much of the data being used on your account is from your phone directly and how much is from other devices connecting through your phone

[SharkNose]

@Jess...

@Jess...ok, I guess what I meant is that the peering / routing outbound from O2 would be the same, regardless of device....

Interesting information though!! The only time I ever got tethering to work on my iPhone 3G PAYG was when iOS4 was released, for some reason for a few days tethering appeared as an option and I didn't even get charged to use it (no bolt-on fee, didn't use up any credit). Since "upgrading" to the iPhone 4 the tethering option no longer appears....

[Joseph Haig]

Facebook security?

If Facebook were at all interested in security, they would enable SSL for the whole site, not just the login page.

<http://www.pcworld.com/article/209333/how_to_hijack_facebook_using_firesheep.html>

The lesson from this is that you should never use Facebook (and a number of other sites) while connected to an open WiFi.

[Anonymous Coward]

so it's BT failing again

They took down Google for an afternoon, the other month. With so many sites hooking back to google for ads and that, the internet was as good as down that time. At least it's only FB this time.

[Steve Evans]

I love this quote

"But a PR later admitted that some people were having trouble logging onto the site, or moving around it at reasonable speed."

Have you notice that nobody ever admits that the site is broken completely, they always errr and pretend there is someone, somewhere who can use it!

"She said, at 2.50pm UK time, the team were working on fixing this and hoped to have everything running properly soon."

Well an hour later is obviously not "soon" in facebook terms... m.facebook.com seems okay from mobiles. Unfortunately it doesn't work from a desktop (without a user-agent hack) as the site tries to be smart and switch a desktop browser back to the desktop site.

[maclovinz]

Across the pond.

My users don't seem to have ANY trouble finding it, when at work!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh noes!

Users will have to actually use other things on teh interwebz. Quel horreur!

We need a Zuckerberg demonface icon...

[dssf]

computer name and email?

Don't they already KNOW the email from when we log in with the correct password? If they expire all the cookies and the user logs in, the user's machine name seems to be forgotten, too. I'm SICK of telling fb this info whenever i log in from my laptop, mobile, desktop, a different browser on each... They're driving me frackin nuts. SO, i just peck in non-text, non-numeric strings of symbols, somewhere between 50 to 200 characters. Waiting to see what happens.

And, yes, fb, get you head out of your backside! Enable SSL from log in to log out. Otherwise, don't TALK about how secure you are.

[Lobster]

hate it

sod all since 6am your time totaly useless

cant be hard to fix almost down 12 hours no updates zip

treating us like total Retards great just before they going sell shares in it ..................

[Anonymous Coward]

FaceBook goes down...

...nobody with a life notices.

[Lobster]

anon

But yet your posting about it ....................

Funny that as your trying degrage other people

[themadpoetuk]

No Facebook on BT/o2 Mobile

FB was slow for me from about midday and since about 3pm GMT haven't been able to get on at all whether via my BT Broadband or o2 (non iPhone) mobile.

Might have to actually be constructive and do some work rather than FBing!! :-O

TMP

[tiddybrook]

Grumble Grumble

19:35 and still can't get access consistently. Can't login at all or can login but can't use any aps or games. Seems others have mentioned being on BT, same here so is it a BT thing and not a Facebook thing??

[DustyJaneway]

Sick of Facebook running so slowly!

I'm using Sky Broadband and Facebook has been running terribly slow for me all day today (14th Jan). It's seriously annoying me! :( I can't do what I want to do on there.... Can't even connect to it using HTC mobile :( I hope they get it sorted soon. I've got some crops I need to harvest in CityVille, god damn it! LOL (Yes, I'm a loser) ;P

[Piglet]

Sick of FaceBook Not working

I have hardly been able to connect at all today.... When I have it's run so slowly taking over 5 mins to accept a request or click on someone's post!!!

No doubt I will loose any crops I have. I am on BT but a friend who is on sky said they were having problems too.

[colin syme]

fashion victime

l believe that those with short attention span will ultimately stop feeding the beast and Facebook will slowly starve to death.

[Alexander Rogge]

New Facebook changes again

Facebook recently started changing the appearance of everyone's profile pages, and the service seemed to start acting up on the same day that the changes started. Facebook always seems to cause problems whenever it tries to change something.

[The Flying Dutchman]

The Grauniad had very similar problems...

From where I'm sitting, guardian.co.uk was painfully slow, with pages taking five minutes to load and often loading only partially, resulting in a jumbled mess. Ditto for Facebook.

It appears to have been a routing/DNS problem, and something to do with caching servers e.g. akamai.net.

Observing my browser status bar, I noticed that things ground to a halt as the browser tried to connect to static.ak.fbcdn.net. A quick search brought up a fix, it was suggested to use a ping/traceroute service such as ping.eu to obtain the offending server's IP addy, and include it in the machine's hosts file. This turned out to indeed solve 99% of the problem.

Same fix worked for the Grauniad, with the problem servers being static.guim.co.uk and combo.guim.co.uk.

I have to admit I was slightly flabbergasted, since I use opendns which is usually quite bulletproof.

[Andy Watt]

Software entropy, I reckon.

FB api using applications seem to have all stopped working recently - constant tinkering and extension by FB now causing core systems to fall offline?

A victim of its own response to security and constant profile layout updates to try and stop itself being the next myspace?

The software telomeres on this behemoth are all used up. Watch it stutter and flicker like a dying, crap Chinese manufactured LCD TV.

But for fun, while it dies, delete all your personal data and replace it with complete comedy drivel! I've enjoyed it. Currently listed as Andy Basexperience tofu-burger.

[Anonymous Coward]

great news

Watching morons go out of their mind is one of my favourite hobbies.

Long may it stay down.