According to our own tests, as well as reports on Twitter, Facebook is down for a vast number of users. It’s the second big outage of the day after Google’s.
While mobile apps are still working for some — some of our writers can load everything with their phones — it’s not the case for everyone. It appears to be a DNS issue. If the address is cached on your phone, you can still access Facebook. Users who can use the mobile apps can apparently load the mobile website, as well.
Facebook experienced some downtime on November 30, making this the second time in two weeks that the site has had reliability issues.
We reached out to Facebook and will update as we learn more.
Update: It’s back after approximately 15 minutes of outage. Even though a 15-minute outage seems minor, it becomes a very important issue when it affects big services, such as Facebook and Google.
When seeing how people react to those outages on Twitter, they forget instantly that the service was down and get back to what they used to do. Outages don’t hurt a company’s reputation if it happens every now and then — unlike during Twitter’s early days.
Yet, Gmail and Facebook are two important communications tools in most people’s workflow. Facebook is a procrastination service, but a way to chat with friends, families and sometimes important work contacts. When an outage occurs, users realize that they rely so much on uptime and service reliability.
There is nothing users can do to make the service come back. It gives a glimpse of what it would be like to live without Facebook or Gmail, giving you a chance to measure the power of those companies. Love them or hate them, many need Facebook and email as much as they need a car.
Update #2: A Facebook spokesperson provided the following statement:
Earlier today we made a change to our DNS infrastructure and that change resulted in some people being temporarily unable to reach the site. We detected and resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100 percent. We apologize for any inconvenience.
