Facebook suffered their second major outage in less than a week today September twenty eight two thousand fifteen. Reports indicated they Facebook.com was down for forty two minutes. However, an official outage details Facebook post stipulated their website was down or not reachable for around two and one half hours.
Last Thursday Facebook was down for about twenty minutes. Today’s outage is longest in over four years. An error condition was blamed for this majour outage. An automated configuration verification system caused this down time.
Facebook claims more specifically succinctly that this automated system deals with their caching utility. A change was made to this utility that caused massive amount of database queries. System engineers at Facebook had to shut down their entire website to stop this massive influx of database queries which caused Facebook.com to grind to a hault.
Once this issue was fixed they throttled traffic and eventually restored Facebook back to normal. These engineers turned off that automatic configuration correction system. You can read Facebook’s official More Details on Today’s Outage post.
Also, in case of future outages you can verify whether or not Facebook is indeed suffering an outage at a couple of websites. Facebook outage map at downdetector.com has a heat map of outage information as well as comments. Ironically, this website uses Facebook comments, but at least you can outage information during possible intermittent problems.
Another website that tracks Facebook outage issues is CurrentlyDown.com which has more detailed information. Service status, response time, and status codes. Also, it keeps track of most recent outages including how much down time. This web page includes a heat map.
Once again ironically, this outage page includes Facebook comments. However, I still think during brief periods when Facebook is live, some people will still possibly post pertinent information.