Downed Facebook accounts still haven't returned
Something is really odd here.
As a reporter covering Facebook, I do get the occasional cranky complaints from members who, for one reason or another, are experiencing errors when they try to access their accounts. But it's never been anything like the past week, with a steady stream of e-mails continuing to come in from Facebook members who say they remain shut out of their accounts--despite assurance from Facebook that profiles have not been deleted and that the company is working on the problem.
"This is now seven days and counting," an e-mail sent on Saturday morning read. "It's beyond ridiculous and extremely frustrating."
"The experience completely reversed the Facebook opinion and experience for me," one reader complained. "I see many people bitch and complain, many more beg and a few threaten. To me, the route to take is fairly obvious. Mark Zuckerberg on his own page invites democratic input from Facebook users in one of his most recent videos. Given that statement especially, I find the way their user base is being treated with respect to their disabled account policy hypocritical at best."
"My account has now been held hostage for a week," another reader wrote. "Some of my friends think that I have deleted (my profile) or even blocked them...None of my friends or family can see my profile or even find it in search. It's as if I simply deleted my account or blocked all of them from seeing it without even a word."
Some users have started threads on Get Satisfaction and Yahoo Answers. A few others have pointed me to blogs and YouTube channels devoted to the subject.
The inaccessible accounts appear to be limited to a very small subset of Facebook's over 300 million active users, which means that it's not a large-scale issue for the health of the site. And Facebook is supported by neither subscription money or taxpayer dollars (though it wouldn't have advertising revenue without its users) so there's an argument to be made that users shouldn't be complaining about something they don't pay for. But that's an argument that many of the people who have come to rely on Facebook as a channel of communication simply don't buy.
Whether the string of complaints is warranted or not, Facebook hasn't disclosed exactly what's caused the "extended maintenance issue," and that's what I find puzzling.
Caroline McCarthy, a CNET News staff writer, is a downtown Manhattanite happily addicted to social-media tools and restaurant blogs. Her pre-CNET resume includes interning at an IT security firm and brewing cappuccinos. E-mail Caroline. 
The page will be back up. If it's not, build another profile or better yet go see what the real world is like
/get off my lawn
Cody
Due to their lack of customer service, I highly recommend everyone to file a better business complaint.
http://sanjose.bbb.org/Business-Report/Facebook-223670
But the longer I think about it the more I find myself agreeing with these folks. While Facebook is free there is hardly any reason to offer the service if it cannot be provided reliably, even if it is only a tiny subset of the Facebook community without access.
So where does that leave us all....
Even if it is free to the user, they still profit from having members. Members=many visitors to the site=advertising revenue. Also bad publicity can hurt. Just address the issue and be done with it!
This is a problem
This very same thing happened to me on Myspace a few years ago. I tried to access my account, and it said there was a problem. Finally, after a few days, I e-mailed them. Of course I did not receive a response. I lost all of my friends on there!! But, a few months later I signed up with the same e-mail address. But, that Myspace experience burned me and I seldom log into my account.
Well what would you do if Gmail, yahool or hotmail had a problem and you couldn't access your account and/or deleted your info and contacts, its the same thing. The site is free, but you would still be mad. And somepeople rely on one site because they dont want to have so many account and digital foot prints. Thats why they have facebook and myspace (they can do email, IM, satust updates, and more), because you wouldnt want to have five different accounts (user name and passwords) when one site can do to all.
It drags on and on. Should we open new accounts and spend another 6 months building up our networks, or sould we wait. If we wait, how long? The real problem is the absolute dearh of information from them. Free or not how much time woukd it take to send a group email to a few thousand users every 6 hours or so with honest estimates of when we might see a return of service and some description of the problem.
For those who think we should expect nothing from a free service, I disagree. Although expectations should probably be low ang QoS not guarenteed, we should not expect a week outage. My account was off for a day in August for maintenance and it was back within 5 hours. I would not consider griping about that, but did get a little concerned when it had been out for 2 days. I would not and have not moaned about the slow responses, the stack overflow errors or the ajax errors because the service is free. All this considered, I would also ask if these haters of free to the user servicesthat post on this free forum, if they really think it is unreasonable to be disconnected for a week with no information??
It is not as if they are not working on the problem, 2 days in acconts were still visible with friends getting a "this account is temporally unavailable try again in a short while. Now there is no such message, it says no account found. That suggests they are cleaning there data base, hopefully in preparation for reinserting the data, but how long do they need..........
In reality this must be either a lost/corrupt backup that is with the menders, or the accounts have been hacked and removed because of some common signature... In both cases the embarassment factor and potential for lost revenue might be the reason for the lack of admission. This is however rather naive, the truth will come out, it always does... Things will be worse then....
Come on FB Give us our accounts back.
dude, create a new account, re-invite your friends and family. Should take 30 minutes. Might take a bit longer (a few hours?) to find some of the pics you've uploaded (they still are on your computer right?) and resubmit them... but 6 months? Common...
Building up a network can take a long time. True, close friends and family can take a short time. But this site is not just to keep in touch with friends and family, it is also used for business and networking. And thosae contacts are harder to find. So yes it can take a while to build a network back up.
facebook will eventually go public. but can you imagine if this problem (a set of users locked out for a week, and their profiles missing, with no plausible explanation) were to happen if facebook were already a public company? what would the fallout be if a service such as google docs or yahoo mail went down for a "small subset" of users?
(by the way, we can only assume "small subset" because there's no official count provided by any reliable source. the fact that facebook placed a message on the front of its help pages addressing the issue suggests the actual number of affected users isn't so small...)
Also, I can't agree with the "It's free, they don't owe you anything" argument. Companies like Google, despite offering free web services like Gmail, have a much better track record with these things. See this: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/more-on-todays-gmail-issue.html. Gmail's web interface went down for *100 minutes* and a blog post was written the *same day* with precise, technical details about the problem and the steps Google was taking to prevent it from happening again!
Basically, just because Facebook isn't based on traditional company/client payment models doesn't mean they can do whatever they want. First of all, from a revenue perspective, Facebook has business relationships with hundreds of advertisers that assume their ads are getting displayed to users. This specific issue won't affect that much, but say a few *million* users experience a similar service problem.
Also, their reputation is at stake here. It's true we can't demand a refund from Facebook, which limits our leverage. But that doesn't change the fact that this is a huge frustration for us, and therefore pretty embarrassing for Facebook. Small subset, yadda yadda, but a *week*? Really?
But really, there are less cynical and more important reasons Facebook needs to be on the ball for things like this. Facebook comprises the social hub of the Internet, and that's a position that cannot be taken lightly. For many people (like me) it's the only way they can stay in touch with large groups of people simultaneously. For armed services, it's an easy way to contact their families. For many political groups it's the backbone of their campaign. For many oppressed peoples, it's a symbol of freedom. And some affected people use these accounts for their businesses, and they're losing *real money* as a result of this failure.
It's like Google's admonition, "Don't be evil". Google realizes that for such a massive company with such far-reaching power, the bottom line isn't the bottom line. They're basically directly responsible for a large part of the Internet, and they have a social contract to fulfill those duties. As far as I can tell, Mark Zuckerberg feels similarly. Companies, especially Internet companies with unusual business models, don't exist solely to make money. They exist to provide a service, and right now Facebook's breaking that contract with me. Whether or not they have a legal responsiblity, they certainly have a moral responsibility to take care of the people who depend on them.
drama much?
Cody
Grow up. You aren't that important.
Due to their lack of customer service, I highly recommend everyone to file a better business complaint.
http://sanjose.bbb.org/Business-Report/Facebook-223670
I too have been down since around 3am US ET last Sunday morning. Although I socialize with many people every day in real life, I use Fb to keep up with my daughter who is 5 hours away at college with her permission (she calls it empty nest solution), my mother who has cancer and updates her status so that her grown children know if she's up to talking with us on the phone that day or not feeling well enough to do so (that way she feels in control and we aren't ringing her phone relentlessly or driving miles and miles to her house when she is not up for the company). I also use Fb to keep in touch with people from 25 years past just to say hi, check on their families and keep in touch during times where we just are not able to spend a lot of time on the phone.
I also understand the position of Fb that we are free users, fair enough, however I spend money on various applications and products advertised which in turn are probably paying Fb some type of fee, right? So as a consumer who periodically buys a product or joins a network or cause and supports that cause financially I would think that by proxy we are paying customers.
Yes, I get the fact that I should keep my contacts outside of Fb and I do for the most part however Fb is simpler to keep in touch with some/many and in some ways has become part of my normal communication processes.
Anyway... I appreciate your updates since I'm sure there are many of us out here that feel like the Fb forgotten.
Many thanks!
sometimes you can see your friends profile then BAM nothing as if they never signed up and searching for them does not find them using the search tool at the top.
- by hugo_goncalves October 10, 2009 9:14 PM PDT
- I'm also on the bad-luck group. I already created a new profile, but it's kind of sad all this situation. I know it's a free service but just imagine if this happend to a lot more people than it did. Let's say 25% of the people were locked out. Yes, it's free but the value of the site it's all about the number of users.
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- by yermom October 12, 2009 11:10 AM PDT
- couldn't care less.
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- by susanb33 October 12, 2009 12:23 PM PDT
- yermom- not sure why you feel the need to respond if you are not the one experiencing the outage. It IS frustrating to those of us who communicated easily with those we love on our fb accounts. i DO have a life outisde of fb but I miss the regular updates of my friends/family. It will be difficult to recreate if our accounts do not come back up. I, for one, am hoping that fb actually comes up with a fix for this issue!!
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Showing 1 of 3 pages (76 Comments)And all of those people who are calling us "crying babies" and "it's a free service", you're lucky it didn't happened to you. I'd like to see your reaction if it happened to you.
i don't run a business through the site, nor do i use the site to organize rallies for the betterment of mankind.
sure, some people actually get something useful out of the site, and some use it as the only way to maintain a long distance relationship with family/friends, but i really don't care that 'little johnny's got a runny nose and i was up all night doing laundry'. please people. stop the drivel.