Facebook suffers outage a day after IPO filing
Popular social network experiences lengthy loading times, but no one's claiming responsibility
By Bob Brown | Network World US | Published: 11:15, 03 February 2012
Social networkers resorted to Twitter during and following a brief Facebook outage on Thursday, a day after the company filed for its initial public offering.
Some users (including me at Network World US) were briefly unable to reach Facebook (for work purposes), while others noted slow loading pages.
Computerworld UK noticed the outage after 10pm GMT.
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Some consulted sites such as DownForEveryoneOrJustMe to confirm that the Facebook outage wasn’t just them, and it wasn’t.
Speculation swirled that hacking group Anonymous, which recently threatened to “kill” Facebook, was behind the outage. But while various Anonymous-related Twitter accounts took note of the outage, they claimed no responsibility for it.
Since the IPO announcement on Wednesday, there has been a lot of talk about how the IPO will affect users and Facebook's push to put more ads on their mobile services.
Others joked that productivity skyrocketed during the outage.
Twitter comments included:
@Schindizzle Facebook's been down for 15 minutes and I'm freaking out because I don't know if anyone's having babies, eating food, eating babies, etc. :(
@crapules THIS IS NOT AN EXERCISE! FACEBOOK DOWN!! I REPEAT!! FACEBOOK DOWN! PLEASE STAY CALM AND PROCRASTINATE ELSEWHERE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
@jasonhiner: I would have never noticed the brief blip of a Facebook outage if people hadn't mentioned it on Twitter. #irony
@brianstucki Facebook is offline. Somewhere, Zuck is walking around a pool screaming, "We're Facebook! Facebook doesn't go down!"
@someecards: I was going to wish you a happy birthday but Facebook was down.
No word yet from Facebook on the outage, but then again, maybe they’re in their pre-IPO quiet period.
