Facebook database outage cut off about 150,000
Thousands of Facebook users who have been unable to access their accounts for nearly a week and a half now are now seeing their profiles restored--but some data related to recent profile updates may have been lost.
What happened? According to Facebook, the replacement of profiles and login screens with a "down for maintenance" notice--which appears to have started on October 3--stemmed from "a technical issue with a single database." The company has stressed that there is no chance that it was due to hackers or other malicious activity.
Profiles should be restored over the course of the next day, the company estimates.
"Our engineering team has worked around the clock, and as of today, all of these users should begin to regain access to their Facebook accounts," Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker said reading from a statement. "We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused and we are taking additional measures to uphold the reliability users come to expect from Facebook."
Less than 0.05 percent of Facebook's users have been affected by the outage, the company estimated. The social network's last head count, about a month ago, was 300 million active users, so that comes out to be a total of about 150,000 affected users. Not very many but enough to put some of them in a panic over not being able to access a primary mode of communication and (in some cases) business.
Profiles have not been lost or deleted, Facebook has continually said--even though the company has been otherwise tight-lipped about the maintenance issue until this point. When affected users' access is restored, however, some things may be different and very recent updates may be missing. According to a notice that Facebook is displaying to members who may have been affected:
You may not have been able to access your account over the last several days. We're sorry for this inconvenience; an extended technical issue affected a small number of Facebook accounts, including yours. We have done our best to restore your account to its most recent state, but some data and settings may not be current. In order to be cautious, we defaulted some of your privacy settings to their most restrictive settings. You may wish to review your privacy settings and reset them.
Facebook added that "some of (affected members') content may not be up to date: in other words, some minor data loss regarding recent updates to profiles. This, according to Facebook, may include photos that were recently added or deleted, recent updates to friends lists (additions and deletions), and "other content you've added, sent, received, or posted."
As for the company's relative silence about the matter until now, Barker explained in a phone call that the company wanted to nail down the specifics of the outage and figure out the situation, rather than provide details to users that could turn out to be inaccurate.
Many of the complaints pertaining to the outage alleged poor customer service on Facebook's part, and as a sort of olive branch, the company is encouraging feedback pertaining to the specific outage. The alert displayed to affected members whose accounts have been newly restored directs them to a form to report any further details or additional problems.
Whether Facebook will step it up a notch for future unexpected technical problems remains to be seen.
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. 
wasn't targeting facebook, just a general view of things
[Big Smile]
What ever happened to getting it from backups? Or just norton ghost the whole thing geesh!
I agree. I lost access about Thursday or Friday, and I still don't have access today. That's seven days. When you say the problem is growing, I think you've got it. I started with just not being able to access my inbox. Then, I couldn't post anything. Then, other links on my pages stopped working. It's getting progressively worse, not better. Then, when you click on "help", you expect to find links that will enable you to report the problem directly to them, either through a fill-in trouble form, an email address, a phone number, or some other method, but there's no way provided to contact them. You're just left hanging out in the breeze. I never even got the message above: "You may not have been able to access your account over the last several days. We're sorry for this inconvenience; an extended technical issue affected a small number of Facebook accounts,....." I'm getting fed-up trying to cope with this mess. I hear MySpace isn't any better, so I'm looking for something else.
You're not alone, and I suspect that the claim that the outage has affected only a very small number of people is not true. I think the number affected is a bunch bigger. Judging from just the comments on this website, how many more people having the problem aren't posting about it on the web someplace? I think the figure of affected accounts is really huge.
People, critics, please understand that Fb has it's place in mainstream communication. Being without a service for 9 days was NOT the end of the world but it was disruptive. Yes I picked up the phone and called my mother, yes she got out of bed to answer when she wasn't feeling well after treatment, yes she spoke to me and said... "didn't you check my status dear, Im really not up for phone calls today"... of the 9 days down she felt well enough to talk on the phone for 4 of them.
My account was returned last night. And yes I'm extremely appreciative for their hard work. The frustration for many of us stemmed from not knowing, not understanding and not being able to figure out why we were suddenly blocked out of Fb.
Many thanks to CNET for following this story. Even when folks were saying it was a few hundred users. You did your best to keep us as informed as possible and provide each other updates on our experience which was very helpful during the 9 days.
FB is not telling the truth.
As FB is not providing any answers, I'm hoping CNET will continue chasing them down and reporting on this issue.
I had account problems 2 or 3 other times this year, too. It's an absolute load of crap, and they should be investigated for their response to the issues and their misrepresentation of the facts to the media.
- by klacour October 23, 2009 6:35 PM PDT
- Oct 23rd and my account is STILL effected. What a mess. Lucky for my it's just a fun social activity that can easily be unlearned, bypassed, and forgetten.
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