The Social

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 has dammed the Twitter river. I bet it was this guy.

(Credit: Creative Commons licensed: flickr.com/photos/sherseydc)

Holy cow. Is nothing on the Internet working these days? Facebook's acknowledged that a number of members have had account maintenance issues, and now Twitter has confirmed that "many" users are experiencing timeline delay problems.

Basically, the lowdown is that you can post tweets, and they'll publish, but that your timeline--the stream of updates from the Twitter accounts you follow--isn't bringing up any new tweets. For me, it looks like this started at around 8:00 a.m. PT.

Twitter, which has been prone to many an outage in its three-year history, says it is investigating the problem and will provide an update shortly.

(Photo by Flickr user sherseydc, licensed under Creative Commons).

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.

Facebook acknowledged on Tuesday afternoon the presence of an internal glitch that left some members with their accounts inaccessible.

"We are currently experiencing a technical issue with one of our databases that is resulting in an extended period of maintenance for some users," a statement e-mailed to CNET News by Facebook spokeswoman Malorie Lucich read. "We are working on a fix now and hope to have this resolved in the next 24 hours."

The member complaints, according to reader e-mails sent to CNET News and comments posted to recent (unrelated) entries on Facebook's company blog, detail an issue in which accounts were rendered inaccessible and replaced by alerts that they were down for maintenance.

Some comments reached levels of borderline hysteria, along the lines of "My original page has been locked since 10/2/09 due to 'site maintenance'. I have contacted FB numerous times and done everything that I have been instructed to do on the site maintenance site...to no avail. PLEASE FB HELP ME."

The "down for maintenance" message is a notice that many of Facebook's 300-million-plus members have seen at one point or another, but in this instance it stuck around for as long as three days, leaving some affected users fearful their accounts had been deleted altogether.

With Facebook acknowledging the problem as a database issue, that likely rules out a malicious activity like the one this summer that saw parts of the site temporarily crippled by a denial-of-service attack.

When Twitter rescheduled some planned downtime in order to stay accessible for Iranian users in the midst of political upheaval, it was at the request of the U.S. State Department, according to CNN.

This should not be taken to mean that the U.S. is attempting to get involved at this point, CNN added. The State Department is working with multiple social-networking and communication services to ensure that conversation and information channels stay active.

"By necessity, the U.S. is staying hands-off of the election drama playing out in Iran, and officials say they are not providing messages to Iranians or 'quarterbacking' the disputed election process," the article by CNN's Elise Labott read.

Because the U.S. has no diplomatic relations with Iran, information gathered on the Web is crucial to its understanding of the post-election unrest that has led to mass protests and fatal clashes with police. Twitter, where users have been filtering relevant information with the hashtag #iranelection, has been a crucial hotspot for raw news.

Twitter's planned maintenance, according to a post on the company's official blog, was selected by its hosting partner, NTT America. The update is "a critical network upgrade [that] must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter," however, so it will instead take place this afternoon when it's well after midnight in Iran.

Meanwhile, in a sort of digital twist on that famous scene in The Thomas Crowne Affair, a new viral campaign is going around Twitter: Users from around the world are resetting the location data in their profiles to Tehran, the capital of Iran, in order to confuse Iranian authorities who may be attempting to use the microblogging tool to track down opposition activity.

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?