Facebook Outage Took Other Sites With It

Facebook suffered another outage today, and took several other sites with it.

A Facebook glitch briefly took down a number of sites that allow you to login through the website on Thursday. The glitch lasted just a few minutes and only affected those logged into Facebook at the time. There were widespread reports of users having trouble getting to sites such as Gawker, CNN, and The Washington Post. Visits to those sites netted a Facebook page that displayed an error. To access these sites, users had to log out of Facebook.

According to CNET, a similar outage happened in December as well. Facebook experienced a short outage during the early evening on December 10, which knocked many users off the social network for about 20 to 25 minutes. The outage caused many Facebook integration features offline such as logins and “like buttons”.

In December, Gmail had experienced a similar issue, sending most Google-related sites offline for 30 to 40 minutes. Being so close to what happened with Facebook, it seemed related. The outage of the two services was felt globally.

According to The Washington Post, Facebook released a short statement after the outage today:

“For a short period of time, there was a bug that redirected people from third party sites integrated with Facebook to Facebook.com. The issue was quickly resolved.”

The outage today was short-lived with a fairly quick work-around, while some sites with Facebook integration may be upset that a flaw in Facebook’s code could affect so many websites and users.

If all else fails, as The Inquisitr has previously reported, there are some humorous steps you can take the next time Facebook goes down.

Did the Facebook outage today effect you?

Facebook’s temporary outage begs the question, is the Internet too connected? bit.ly/XsHwFB

— Digital Trends (@DigitalTrends) February 8, 2013