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.
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.
There are some things that are nice to wake up to. The smell of bacon, for example. On Thursday morning, however, I woke up to something a little less pleasant: an in-box full of e-mails from Facebook members whose accounts are still inaccessible. Some were more or less on the verge of, well, panic.
Earlier this week, we wrote about Facebook's acknowledgment that some members could not access their accounts for several days, instead receiving a "down for maintenance" error. At the time, a Facebook representative explained that it was a "technical issue with one of our databases" and estimated that it would be resolved within 24 hours. It's unclear how many accounts have been affected.
But a resolution of the problem doesn't seem to have occurred, judging by the e-mails that were still showing up in my in-box well into Thursday morning. I sent another request to Facebook to find out more.
"We are continuing to work on the extended maintenance issue that is restricting some users from accessing their accounts," a statement e-mailed by a Facebook representative explained. "No accounts have been compromised during this process, and access will be restored as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience."
Reader e-mails indicated quite a bit of frustration.
"I lost my job back in March and have been using this site as a networking tool," one reader's e-mail said. "It's frustrating that it's been down for so long."
Some were paranoid that their accounts had been deleted and all their contacts lost. And many of the e-mails cited unresponsiveness on Facebook's part despite multiple customer service complaints. Third-party customer service forum Get Satisfaction was filled with chatter about Facebook login and access problems, including at least one threat of a class-action lawsuit.
"Accounts are still down as of this Thursday morning," another e-mail read. "Facebook has been completely non responsive to its users. My account has been down with site maintenance issues since Saturday. I have sent over 20 requests to FB and joined help user groups looking for answers."
From yet another e-mail: "So far Facebook has been largely unresponsive to my emails, saying that this issue can't be reported as a security issue. It seems absurd to me that Facebook customers have no way to directly contact Facebook regarding problems."
With over 300 million active users around the world, we shouldn't expect Facebook to be able to respond to every inquiry it receives. And Facebook is a free product, so it arguably doesn't have a customer service obligation on par with your cable company or the Web site where you bought your last pair of shoes. But this is still a real problem for the social network, which has become so ingrained in culture and communication that for some people it's replaced the address book, the e-mail client, and the personal Web site. Many of the e-mails I received came from people who say that Facebook is their primary method of communication with far-flung family and friends. Others said it's crucial to how they do business.
Here's something else: Facebook doesn't offer a way for members to export their contact information into an address-book format, something that took center stage when blogger Robert Scoble had his Facebook account temporarily banned after testing a script that would export his contacts' information to Plaxo. Even now that Facebook has launched its Facebook Connect login product, there still is no easy way to access your contacts offline. The current account-access snafu indicates that this is a big void.
At the very least, Facebook could make some kind of mass message available explaining what exactly the problem is and reassuring people that inaccessible accounts have not been permanently deleted (assuming that's the case)--something easier to find and more detailed than the brief statement now posted to its company "fan page." On a more long-term level, this seems like a big red flag that Facebook needs to streamline its customer service operations somehow so that this sort of hysteria can be prevented.
A way to export basic contact information for offline access--phone numbers, e-mail addresses, instant-message screen names--wouldn't be bad either.
This post was updated at 10:41 a.m. PT with comment from Facebook.
Salesforce's Service Cloud dashboard. Click for larger version.
(Credit: Salesforce)Twitter customer service: It's the hot new thing that all the kids are doing! Salesforce has added a new application to its "app exchange" so that clients who use its Service Cloud product can better wrangle Twitter for customer service purposes. It'll be available this summer.
With the app, called Salesforce CRM for Twitter, clients can monitor Twitter messages that pertain to their company, aggregate the replies and conversations around those messages, and then respond to the inquiries and complaints and whatnot.
Service Cloud already helps clients keep tabs on the likes of Facebook, Blogger, and Web forums.
Alex Dayon, Salesforce CRM's senior vice president of customer service and support, said that with the abundance of social-media tools on the Web, people are turning to "crowdsourced" help with customer-service issues. I don't blame them. When was the last time you spent ages on the phone with your TV manufacturer only to have some random Twitter follower provide you the solution in five minutes?
"While $20 billion of software is being spent on call centers, the customers are somewhere else," he said.
The people have spoken: Netflix will not be eliminating user profiles, the account feature that lets you split movie rentals among separate queues for a household. The company had announced the removal of profiles earlier this month, much to user dismay.
"As someone who enjoys helping his 4-year-old daughter manage her one-DVD-at-a-time, G-rated sub-account, I identified with these thoughtful pleas to maintain Profiles," a Netflix product manager identified only as "Todd" wrote on the company's blog. "Because of an ongoing desire to make our website easier to use, we believed taking a feature away that is only used by a very small minority would help us improve the site for everyone. Listening to our members, we realized that users of this feature often describe it as an essential part of their Netflix experience."
When Netflix opted to eliminate profiles, the company said that the feature was only used by a small sliver of its member base. It was a vocal sliver, however, and a thread on customer service forum Get Satisfaction revealed a host of angry users, ranging from families who wanted to keep parental controls on separate queues for their children to spouses who didn't want to bicker over disparate film tastes.
With members threatening cancellation or--shudder!--a switch to troubled rival Blockbuster, it clearly wasn't a great move on Netflix's part. Response to it had been overwhelmingly negative, and the company clearly got clued in.
For the past two years, my roommate and I have split a Netflix user account, mostly so that I don't have to deal with his trashy action-movie picks mucking up my queue of navel-gazing Wes Anderson knockoffs, and so that we can ensure a clean split in our four-at-a-time subscription. He'd totally hog it otherwise.
But starting on September 1, we're going to have to suck it up. The rental-by-mail service announced on its blog on Thursday that it would be doing away with separate user profiles on the same account.
The reason, the post explained, is that it's a little-used feature that some people found complicated: only a percent of Netflix members use it. "We will do our best to find better ways for families to share accounts than the existing profiles feature," it read, "and will continue to invest in improving the Web site experience in many different ways."
So maybe a new kind of split-household account is on the way, but for now, my roommate and I are going to have to either share a password (which could raise security concerns for some people) or pay for two separate accounts (which will cost more for both of us). Customized recommendations will be directed to both of us rather than our individual accounts, which means--eek!--that I'm going to see Meet the Spartans recommended to me instead of Flight of the Conchords.
Lousy move, Netflix.
A thread on feedback forum Get Satisfaction revealed that other people aren't too happy either. Some raised concerns that they could no longer operate separate queues with parental controls for their children, and others expressed plights similar to mine--they share accounts with roommates or housemates who have vastly different cinematic tastes.
"Way to go, Netflix, I'll just be canceling the service at this point," one user wrote. "I specifically upgraded to the four-at-a-time service to split out the queues for my wife and myself. I'm not going to pay for another separate account."
And if you've been using separate Netflix profiles as a way to cloak your porn habit (or chick-flick habit) from your spouse, get ready. You'll have some explaining to do come September.
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