Facebook acknowledges access problems

Facebook acknowledged on Tuesday afternoon the presence of an internal glitch that left some members with their accounts inaccessible.

"We are currently experiencing a technical issue with one of our databases that is resulting in an extended period of maintenance for some users," a statement e-mailed to CNET News by Facebook spokeswoman Malorie Lucich read. "We are working on a fix now and hope to have this resolved in the next 24 hours."

The member complaints, according to reader e-mails sent to CNET News and comments posted to recent (unrelated) entries on Facebook's company blog, detail an issue in which accounts were rendered inaccessible and replaced by alerts that they were down for maintenance.

Some comments reached levels of borderline hysteria, along the lines of "My original page has been locked since 10/2/09 due to 'site maintenance'. I have contacted FB numerous times and done everything that I have been instructed to do on the site maintenance site...to no avail. PLEASE FB HELP ME."

The "down for maintenance" message is a notice that many of Facebook's 300-million-plus members have seen at one point or another, but in this instance it stuck around for as long as three days, leaving some affected users fearful their accounts had been deleted altogether.

With Facebook acknowledging the problem as a database issue, that likely rules out a malicious activity like the one this summer that saw parts of the site temporarily crippled by a denial-of-service attack.

[SwissJay]

If they would take their own TOS serious and weed out all the fake accounts that people use to either play Facebook apps or phish information, it would probably cut a good 1/3 out of those 300 million members. Of course, that wouldn't look as good as 300 million anymore, so they'll leave it alone.

But considering that the whole thing is free, I'm not going to ***** too much ;)

[Eddie-c]

Who appointed you as the almighty decision maker for people that may want to create an fb to use/play some app there? Get off your high horse.

[bobtongue]

I haven't been able to log into Facebook since late Saturday night. It wasn't until today that Facebook would even acknowledge a problem. I understand that the service is free, but there should be at least a minimum amount of user support / information. To leave this many people hanging without a reason is not something you would expect from a social networking site. It's not very social. BTW, I still cannot use Facebook, but at least now they have posted a message saying that it should be fixed within the next 24 hours. We will see.

[alisonm62]

I haven't had access pretty much the same time - at first it was 'within a few hours' and since sunday it has been 'within 24 hours' As you say, not very social - and almost unbelievable that they ahven't been unable to unfreeeze these affected accoutns. It sucks. From the bland tone of their announcement no one particularly gives a whatever.

[freshapril]

I have been in the same situation. I have sent emails to facebook help and all I received was a reply stating that they could not read every email that they received. At least now I know it wasn't just me.

[teter4]

I have been locked out since Sunday morning. I think the most frustrating thing is that there is no way to contact a real person. So I have been waiting for nearly four days for them to resolve my problem and wondering if I will ever get back in again! Arrrggghhh!!!!

[inachu1]

not just a glitch but the new google toolbar works with everysite except facebook.
even with my password checked to be saved by via cookies and also saved in the web browser the facebook website still prompts me for a password. WHAT THE HECK PEOPLE!

[brodypros]

Sucks to have free stuff doesn't it?

[cvaldes1831]

The point is that the outage reflects poorly on Facebook's ability to run reliable services. Their reputation is devalued with each major, publicly revealed shortcoming. Same with Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, MySpace, whatever.

This may point to a fundamental operational flaw where Facebook is neglecting to enforce the two-person rule on production systems. I personally believe that Google services have gone down a couple of times for the same sloppiness.

The fact of the matter is that these outages do not advance the general public's confidence in Facebook's senior management. As a privately held company, we have no knowledge of their financials, so we can only judge them by their public actions.

This sort of failure does not resonate professionalism.

[keithforever]

This issue started Saturday night, Countless people including myself have struggled through the useless help pages on their site to try to report the issue. Countless emails have been sent since then without a single response to my knowledge until I received one today (2 days later) which was a canned response basically telling me the same thing the error message says.... maintenance is occasionally performed and you may be unable to access for a "few" hours. The problem I reported said I have been unable to access since early Sunday and I got this response late Tuesday. This means the person didn't even bother reading the message and had no knowledge there was an issue or was lying completely. At this time I figured I was the only one having the problem until I discovered a couple of blogs that had reports of the same issue. I even commented that I was surprised that CNET or other popular sites haven't picked up on this yet. But I am happy to know that I am not alone but not very happy with the way Facebook let down their users as far as communication. Here is a quote from their site:

?Giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.?

Facebook certainly has not followed their own belief. Although a free site, there should be a better level of communication between them and their users especially if they want people to remain members and continue to grow. I have personally lost a lot of respect for them with thei issue.

[thhalejr01]

That's what I don't get with people and their complaining. Facebook could resolve this very fast and easy. They could upgrade all of their servers and databases; provide better customer service; and, give users more experiences than they have now. All they need to do is to start charging a nominal monthly fee for their services, but then you would see folks complaining about that, so it's damn if you do, and damn if you don't.

[cvaldes1831]

@thhalejr01:

But once a company starts charging for services, their usage level just plummets.

That's the crux of the problem for online publishers (a.k.a. "newspapers" and other media outlets). Why should we pay for local news at Site X when we can get it free elsewhere at ten other sites?

Is Facebook's content so unique and awesome that people will pay for it, or will most people just go elsewhere, just as they nomadically drifted from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook to whatever-the-next-site-will-be.com?

[cvaldes1831]

@thhalejr01:

I guess it's also worth pointing out that Facebook is a dominant social network site for the U.S.A., but not in many other places on this planet. Facebook's competitors have strong footholds both here (U.S.) and abroad. If Facebook suddenly started charging people subscription fees and the others continued free access, there could be a quick realignment.

[harmonic33]

I'd rather pay a nominal fee and get service and support while blocking all ads and dumb 'app' requests just as I pay an annual fee for Salon Premium.

[cvaldes1831]

@harmonic33:

Again, it's about what the general marketplace will accept. That's fine if *you* would pay, but the point that you seem to not have understood is that *most* people don't. In the same that most people don't pay for Salon Premium.

Why pay a premium to have ads removed when you could install freeware utilities (for example, AdBlock Plus and NoScript) and block ads everywhere?

[Renegade Knight]

It's not that simple. The price I pay is to always look at adds. The price those advertisers pay is no where near free. Without eyeballs, the advertisers aren't getting what they paid for. Without use 'free users' they don't have eyeballs. Without reliablity we all go somewhere else.

So free isn't free.

[Paul_PI]

It is now 84 hours since I first faled to log in. Free or subscription is not really the point. Any user service supplier should treat its customers with the same respect that they treat there advertisers. They are both critical to the business model. When you finally dig out (I use the term in its most literal cyber sense) the contact point and take the advice offered and then because it is over 24 hours ask what is going on, one would expect a reasonably cogent reply saying it may take a few days. The bland statement does not convey any sense of what is happening.

The reason advertisers are using there scarse dollers/pounds/euros to advertise is that the customers have come to rely omn FBas a means of communication. I have recieved a number of email messages relayed from FB that I cannot reply to, and it is me who will have to explain to these folks why I did not respond.

The point is that previous maitenance down time has lasted a few hours as ststed and this is to be expected. This is even true if this was a message to coverup a software glitch or hack. The real issue is that after the initial 24 Hours an automated message to those affected would have been common courtesy. I did not even know unto 50 hours had gone by that any one else was affected.

Lets hope the current 24 hours is true. Faith, what faith.... Perhaps they will learn that burying one's head is no answer, doing more harm than good.

[qrtrnotes]

I totally agree, Renegade! The business model of Facebook is brilliant as it is. If they begin to charge, they will lose most of their customers. The advertisers are where its at! Its the same concept as a toll road. The toll roads have much less cars because not many people want to pay to drive when they can get there for free!

[sundance808]

this is to be expected since its free... with amazon's cloud service even if you're a paying customer you'd be lucky to get support when something happens (unless you've paid for their "premium" support of course).

[jgrab1]

Ah yes, all ye who sing enthusiastically about cloud computing, take note. Of course something like this will happen to you right before the presentation for the $50 million dollar account.

[criss09]

Wow! The sad part about this is that FACEBOOK has waited till now to say something to the public when this happened late Saturday night! They cant say they just now noticed. Myself and I am sure alot of others tried emailing them countless times and there poor customer service NEVER once replied back! I just happen to search this issue and found this, but if I wouldnt of I still would have no idea what was going on. They should have sent out an email blast to everyone that had there site down and told them what was going on! I wish this problem would of happened to everyone so nobody would use Facebook anymore! I know mistakes happen but when your ignoring everyone and leaving them to wonder, thats when its not ok! With the type of problems they have already they wont last long anyway with all the social sites that ACTUALLY WORK!!!

[keithforever]

Makes you wonder if you want to invest anymore in uploading photos and sharing info with others when you are suddenly left in the dark for days unable to access with no explanation huh? Certainly has me rethinking if Facebook is a place I want to go to do this.

[thhalejr01]

Why don't we ask Facebook to upgrade all of their services with state of the art servers, databases, and 24/7 customer service for a nominal monthly fee? That is how you ensure that you get the type of service that you're asking for, or pay for shared or dedicated server space yourself from a hosting company. The service is free; with 300 million accounts, the bandwidth is going to get overloaded from time to time or the database is going to be corrupted. What do you expect? If they offered 99.999 uptime, would you be willing to pay for them? That's the question, because it can be accomplished.

[cvaldes1831]

Paid service would probably clobber their user base. Why pay for something that you can get for free elsewhere?

Remember webmail before Google Mail? Two or three megabytes of free space, puny attachments. Want POP3 support? That's extra.

Today? Gmail accounts have about seven gigs of space (maybe more), plus free IMAP support. All for free.

As long as someone else is providing it for free, not many are gonna pay.

[keithforever]

If you can't offer a reliable service with the resources you have then don't bother. I am not going to ask them to do anything. They are responsible for their expenses and provide a decent service with what they have. If they need to charge, then so be it. I don't accept the fact that they suck people in to this social network then later let the service go to crap when people depend on it for various reasons. So pulling the "well it is free" card is not an excuse. If they can't handle the load, then they shouldn't be in business and if your favorite site, Facebook or not, has the same issue, I think you would think different than commenting on infrastructure costs.

[harmonic33]

I and many others will gladly pay to gain a higher level of accountability and the absence of ads and unwanted app invites.

[ntamiller]

they normally reply, I dont always reply because facebook chat is way too slow on my computer so that might be one reason for them to not reply

<a href="http://ezinearticles.com/?Force-Factor-Reviews---Dont-Buy-Until-You-Read-This-Review&id=3016296">Force Factor</a>

[kzeesdesign]

I am one whom this site maintenance issue has affected, have not been able to log in to FB since Saturday 10/3 at around 9:45pm Eastern. I also have been affected financially from this outage as I was informed yesterday that I lost a business contract because I did not respond to an inquiry posted by a customer on FB Saturday prior to the outage. That I am furious over. This experience has certainly taught me a huge lesson. I am not sure that when and if (after not hearing from FB for over 3 days about their acknowledgement of the problem) the site becomes available that I will continue to use it for business purposes. I understand the need for site maintenance downtime, especially with such a large number of users and I understand the need for taking accounts down occasionally to do such. But I DO NOT understand the lack of communication that FB had over this issue. You cannot tell me they were not aware of the problem a simple search on the web just hours after the occurrence showed numerous complaints about the issue. Had they responded to any of the 37 emails and help post that I made I could have avoided the loss of business. For three days and despite what they are now saying I feared and still fear that my site is gone. I DO NOT trust what they are saying now about the issue being resolved within 24 hours. This whole thing has me discouraged as I am an adult continuing education instructor and have for three years now taught senior citizens how to use computers and the Internet to enrich their lives. I have fought to overcome their natural responses to not trust the Internet and give them some peace of mind in an unfamiliar world. This experience completely tears down my beliefs in the system and I am not sure if I will ever trust a social network again. Yes it is a free service and yes I choose to participate on a business level. I am not upset that the problem occurred. I can understand that but I am upset that FB made NO effort to let us know what was going on for over three days.. That is inexcusable in my book.

[marsjtnt]

the bottom line is that you should never make business transactions over any social network. you get what you pay for. there are many ways to do business and social networking sites is just not smart. i cannot understand being mad at a service that is free. as far as communication facebook gave announcements that the site was "down for maintenance". and since you are educating elderly in using computers i would advised them that websites will crash, will be hacked and that they will experience issues. you have to understand that facebook has over 300 million users- thats the entire population of america. your 37 emials were probably looked over because im sure there will tens of thousands of more sitting in there inbox

[kzeesdesign]

agreed I have learned my lesson and you are right i will never trust it again..

[HildebrandJohnson]

"the 37 emails and help post that I made"

Did you think sending more than one or two would help?

How many of us are being affected by this outage? I have no idea, but I imagine it's a bunch. Let's say for the sake of argument it's 10,000. Some of those didn't send any email, but some, like you, sent dozens, so let's conservatively say they got 30,000 email messages.

How long does it take to open, read, and paste in a response? They could automate the process, but not all the email messages they've gotten are about this. Let's call it a minute. That's sixty an hour.

That's 500 man hours to just send a stock response. That would have had to wait until Monday, anyway, since that's when the non-technical people would come in. The technical staff over the weekend we hope were working on the problem, not checking the customer email account.

Could they have sent a mass email to everyone affected? We don't know that they even have contact information for the people who can't log on. We don't know the extent of the problem. And if they tried to send out that many emails at once spam filters all over the Web would kick in. Heck, the number of email messages they got mail have caused mail server problems themselves.

A better solution would be to put something on the Web site. Which they did. If you click on "Help" it's the first thing you see. Maybe they could have gotten it up sooner, but for all we know they thought all along that they almost had it licked.

I, for one, would rather have the technical staff working on the problem actually working on the problem, not updating answering questions for other people so they can keep sending out email.

They are losing revenue, since they are losing the ad page views for every user affected. I don't think they are dragging their feet. They are trying to get this resolved as quickly as possible. Whining and shouting and crying isn't going to speed up the process.

[harmonic33]

Give me a well supported, ad-free, unwanted app-free option and I will gladly pay.

[qrtrnotes]

But will all of your friends? What good is a social networking site if you're the only one of your friends on it?

[qrtrnotes]

Facebook is a free site...yes. However, they are not without income! The inventor of Facebook is a billionaire. They have advertisers...customized advertisers. That kind of information is priceless to advertiser. I am a Christian homeschooler interested in natural parenting. The adds I see are customized to those interests (homeschool curriculum, natural products, parenting interests). If we cannot get on for 3-4 days at a time, those advertisers aren't reaching their demographic during those days and they are potentially losing money. If Facebook cannot deliver on its promise that their adds will have exposure to a certain number of customers....they will spend their advertisement dollars elsewhere.
If Facebook started charging a fee, they'd be making money from two sources at first. Then people would start quitting Facebook, then advertisers would stop placing adds with Facebook..and the whole thing would fall apart.

[lfdivatoo]

Mighty nice of Facebook to finally admit there was a problem-- after three days. I especially loved their three line apology on the "help" page, which didn't let users know a timeframe for a remedy to the situation. Gee thanks, Facebook, you are awesome.

[ThePrairiePrankster]

The outage and lack of access is a feature. Go do something else for a few days and then share your adventures when the error is fixed. Facebook can be a lot of fun, but since most seem unwilling to pay for the service then we all have to live with spotty service and crappy customer service. Would I pay for what we get on Facebook today? No, it is not that important nor unique to make it worth one iota of stress, but I like Facebook and can live with it's faults. Have a great day!

[blueman78]

When I read their "Help" links and they addressed the "Site Maintenance" message, I thought it would be OK. But then I realized I was reading this information at the tail end of the 24 hours they say maintenance should take place. I noticed the issue on Sunday night. It's now Wednesday and it's still an issue. Thanks Facebook for actually taking the time to publicly admit this is a problem...but 3 days to do so? ***?!?!?!?! I'm in agreement with others on this thread in that I acknowledge that this is a free service. But if they make it as easy to connect with everyone as they do and include all the different features that they have, at least have the know-how to handle maintenance quickly and be bold enough to admit there is a problem sooner.

I kinda feel powerless a little bit because almost EVERYONE uses Facebook and when something like this only happens to a few people, it's pretty hard to boycott.

[nicmart]

Facebook is bug-infested crap. it's almost as unendurable as Skype and Gizmo.

[freshapril]

How much do you want to bet that they fix will take longer than 24 hours? I have been locked out due to maintenance since 10/3/09. With no response from facebook help.

[Harrison912]

I mainly use Twitter to socially market my safety and security web site so having it down is a problem but it's not the end of the world. Thanks, Caroline for this info.

[heidil1983]

hi i havent been able to access my facebook account since saturday, ive contacted them ova an ova again but have never recieved a msg bk from them which is rather upsetting!!!! i really hope they sort it out soon, my fishes will be dead by now and i wont have any money 2 buy anymore!!! plz hurry up 2 fix the problem

[ratsareevil]

Yeah i've neglected my Mafia!!!!!

[ratsareevil]

I suppose i am some what relieved to see that i'm not the only one that has faced this login problem! I was really worried at first and checked my pal pal account as thought it was a hacking issue.My account like many has been down since sat night and i received an email a couple of days after complaining myself,the email stated though that they couldn't give a time limit on when the could fix this problem.

[hideout587]

It took FaceBook 3 days to even admit there was a problem, and then they said it would be resolved within 24-hours. Those 24-hours have come and gone, and still I and tens of thousands of others (maybe even millions??), have NO access to Facebook (4, going on 5 days now!). But, if you check their Twitter page at http://twitter.com/facebook, they have the gall to boast about how they released new Apps today!! (see: http://bit.ly/17l2me ). Ugh!!!