Facebook attributes earlier outage to technical glitch
Facebook representatives have responded to inquiries about why exactly the site was totally down for about an hour and a half today--it was a bug, they say, not a hacking problem or a server outage.
"This morning, we temporarily took down the Facebook site to fix a bug we identified earlier today," the company statement read. "This was not the result of a security breach. Specifically, the bug caused some third-party proxy servers to cache otherwise inaccessible content. The result was that an isolated group of users could see some pages that were not intended for them. The site has now been restored and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused."
That would be why, it seems, some Facebook users (both on blogs and in our comments) reported that they had seen what appeared to be other users' data on their Facebook log-ins. So, to the bloggers who speculated a proxy issue: looks like you were dead on.
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.
