With SocialAds on the way, is Facebook getting the shakes?

There are just over 24 hours left until the formal announcement of Facebook's new advertising initiative. Is the site experiencing some jitters in preparation?

Late last week, one of my editors IMed me to ask whether Facebook was down. It was, but within five minutes, it was running again. Over the weekend, I noticed that the site was logging me out periodically. I wanted to check out a friend's new profile photo, but I repeatedly got log-in screens instead.

Then, on Monday morning, the site has slowed to a crawl. When I attempted to approve a new friend request, Firefox asked that I save a PHP file to my computer rather than actually opening up a page. Eventually, it allowed me to approve the request, but I'm still getting "page timed out" messages on occasion.

It's not necessarily anything major: in the summer of 2006, both Craigslist and MySpace.com experienced major outages that threw off the sites' operations, for example. And don't even get me started on Second Life. But the Facebook mini-outages and glitches have been noticeable, and that's not good when you're trying to get big ad partners onboard a new project.

There's no official word from Facebook on whether all this is due to server issues, connection issues, or the fact that I used a stupid profile photo of myself in my Halloween costume. (I've since taken it down.)

Has anyone else out there experienced Facebook instability over the past few days?

[TopOutColleges]

Facebook down...

I think it was just yesterday that Facebook logged me out and was down for about 5 minutes. I thought it was just me, but then realized that none of my friends could get on either. I guess they're heavily testing the new stuff they're about to roll out.

[seth.levy]

facebook issues

this morning all of my apps were missing, my news feed was empty, and it asked me for a security question! An hour later it was all back to normal...

[BobRed0965]

I noticed it too

I also notices the same thing. Of the 3 times I treid to log into Facebook this weekend, all 3 failed on the first attempt, but were successful after re-trying in 5-10 minutes.

[templemac10]

It's been down

Facebook has been very glitchy lately. I like it how they start having
problems with their website after they announce their partnership
with Microsoft. They should have gone with Google; the Microsoft
deal will kill facebook in the end.

[Gasaraki]

Wow...

Genius... Who would have thought of that? It has to be Microsoft's fault.

I love it how Microsoft haters and Mac zealots always find some way to bring plug in those companies.

[rebeccca]

Shaky for sure!

I was trying to test our tagging and linking of verbdate profiles on facebook and was experiencing the exact same problems all weekend. Frustrating really, but I guess it can be expected at some point when your doing all the things they are...R

http://apps.facebook.com/verbdate/