Is Facebook Down? Yes For Some. Outages Have Lasted Two Hours and Counting

“Let me tell you the difference between Facebook and everyone else, we don’t crash EVER!” – ‘Mark Zuckerberg’, The Social Network. Not quite. Facebook has been offline or slow to load for some users around the world for over two hours. Reports started flooding in to Twitter at roughly 4:26pm PST today with many users quipping that “Facebook is down. Just like its stock price.”

Despite some who lost service regaining it temporarily, two hours in DownForEveryoneOrJustMe confirms the outage continues for portions of Facebook’s 900 million users, though others have had no trouble logging on. We’re awaiting a response from Facebook on the cause.

Similar to Facebook’s IPO, which was largely chronicled with tweets rather than the social network itself, Facebook users are turning to Twitter to vent their frustration with the downtime. The site so rarely encounters loading problems that the outage has come as quite a shock to some, whereas Twitter’s short but frequent hiccups have come to be expected. Today’s outage could be do to a coordinated hacking attempt, or just some Facebook-caused technical glitch

Facebook goes down, U.S. workforce productivity suddenly spikes for the first time since 2004.—
Calvin Fleming (@calvinfleming) June 01, 2012

Despite the jokes, Facebook was actually up $1.41% today to close at $29.60, but is still 23% below its IPO price. We’ll have to see how the outage impacts its share price tomorrow morning.

Update 5:46pm PST: 80 minutes after the outage began we’re hearing reports that users in the United Staes, Brazil and Tunisia and likely other locations lost service, but the site seems to be coming back to life for others, including me.

Update 6:00pm PST: 95 minutes after the site started to sputter it looks like most of those users who lost service have now regained it, though there are still reports of outages.

[Update 6:26pm PST: Looks like things weren’t quite fixed. 2 hours in and some users in the US and around the world are still experiencing outages, including those who regained service around 6:00pm.]

As Jesse Eisenberg fumed during his fictional portrayal of ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ in Aaron Sorkin’s dramatized history of Facebook, ‘The Social Network’:

“If those servers are down for even a day, our entire reputation is irreversibly destroyed! Users are fickle, Friendster has proved that. Even a few people leaving would reverberate through the entire userbase. The users are interconnected, that is the whole point. College kids are online because their friends are online, and if one domino goes, the other dominos go, don’t you get that? I am not going back to the Caribbean Night at AEPi!”

Honestly, Facebook has been remarkably reliable over the last few years, even as its user base swells. But hopefully the site’s engineering team doesn’t mine sipping on a Caribbean piña colada while they sort things out.

[Image Credit: TwitterWhale]