Facebook downtime

Facebook has been experiencing some major downtime today in various locations around the world:

"After issues at a third-party networking provider took down Facebook for some users on Wednesday, the social networking site is once again struggling to stay online.

The company reports latency issues with its API on itsdeveloper site, but the problem is clearly broader than that with thousands of users tweeting about the outage.

On our end when we attempt to access Facebook, we’re seeing the message: “Internal Server Error – The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.” Facebook “Like” buttons also appear to be down on our site and across the Web"

Details are still sketchy (there's speculation Akamai is at fault). And that's the problem. It's almost all speculation right now. The official word from facebook is simply:

"We are currently experiencing latency issues with the API, and we are actively investigating. We will provide an update when either the issue is resolved or we have an ETA for resolution."

That's not going to cut it when you have 500+ millions, and countless developers (Zynga must be freaking out right now). I'm seeing about 400 tweets/second complaining about the downtime. Outages will happen. The problem isn't the downtime itself. Where Facebook is missing the boat is using this opportunity to build increased trust with their user and developer community by simply opening up the curtains a bit and telling us something useful. I've seen some movement from Facebook on this front before. But there's much more they can do, and I'm hoping this experience pushes them in the right drirection. Give us back a sense of control and we'll be happy. 

P.S. You can watch for updates here, here, and here.