The Worst Facebook Crash in Years

It seems Facebook has dominated not only the web but everyday news as well, whether it be the new Facebook movie, privacy improvements, or new features. This time, however, Facebook has got nothing to be proud about.

The world's leading social network site says it has suffered the worst shutdown in four years. So in case you tried and failed to log on to Facebook on Thursday, you are not alone it is thought that some 135 million people were unable to log on at the time (September 23rd).

The problems began at around 7pm and lasted for over two hours. Facebook responded officially and blamed the problem on a software flaw, which caused a "huge disruption" to the site that has 500 million users worldwide. This meant the site had to be shut down while engineers fixed the problem.

Millions of people posted comments about the shutdown on blogs and other sites like Twitter, saying Facebook should be ashamed, being the huge service that it is. In addition, one of Facebook's senior engineers Robert Johnson apologized to everyone who couldn't log on. In a statement on his blog he said: "The key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition,” he said.

"An automated system [to fix the problem] ended up causing more damage than it fixed,” he continued.

Basically, the outage many people experienced, meant they were greeted by the message "Network Error (dns_server_failure).” However, some other users, yours truly included, didn't get any notifications, but a blank screen which was everything but social.

Robert Johnson added: "Once the database had recovered and the root cause had been fixed, we slowly allowed more people back onto the site,” a precautionary step meant to prevent another collapse.