Facebook Down; Worm May Be to Blame
Although they have over 158,000 followers, Facebook has not communicated any service outages via their Twitter account. However, the Twitterverse is abuzz with Facebook users reporting slow loading pages or complaining of not being able to access the site.
At the same time, an employee of AVG, maker of free anti-virus software, reported over the weekend that a worm may be infecting users' walls. The worm is activated after a user clicks on a suggestive photo, supposedly posted by a friend, connects the user with an infected page.
Facebook, through a spokesman, suggested the hijacked browsers were not caused by a worm but clickjacking. Although the site may be falling to the deeds of a single nefarious web developer, Facebook is not a full performance as of this writing, including a maintenance outage and a content display challenges. The screenshot below was taken in Seattle over a residential broadband connection, running English versions of Firefox and OS X, using a US user account.
Back in October, 150,000 Facebook users lost access to their accounts for nearly a week and half. There were few details provided by Facebook after the outage about the cause of the problem, and the company said less than 1% of their users were affected. At the time, a Facebook spokesperson indicated the company was focusing on reliability to prevent future outages.
It's unclear what percentage of Facebook users are unable to access their accounts, and early indications show that it is not only confined to site access through a browser. Users of the Facebook on iPhone are also reporting issues with accessing their accounts and erratic updates.
Facebook has acknowledged the problem and has yet to provide a timeline or instructions to users who have been affected.
