Facebook took over the internet for a short time on Thursday. According to NBC News on Feb. 8, a bug with Facebook’s embedded widgets that redirected millions from the website they were visiting back to an error message on Facebook.
The problem has been fixed, but from 4:30 to 4:42 p.m. PT some of the largest sites on the web could not be accessed. For some sites the problem lasted longer and was closer to an hour. Websites like CNN, The Washington Post and NBC were just a few of the sites that were inaccessible.
If a user was not logged into their Facebook account, they did not receive the error. The problem was with the Facebook Connect service that governs “likes,” “comments,” and other features of the social network.
Since the outage was so widespread and public, a more thorough explanation is expected from Facebook. This explanation will be released once they have time to see exactly what went wrong.
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