Reawakening fears of the Great Facebook Outage of 2010, in which the social networking site went down for roughly 2.5 hours, users in the eastern U.S. awoke to a much briefer outage June 19 around 4 a.m.
For approximately half an hour, Facebook users had to turn to other networks to get their morning fixes of trending topics and status updates. Like Facebook's other outages, the downtime was experienced worldwide.
Facebook suffered server woes on Oct. 21, 2013, but the downtime June 19 is the worst outage the site has experienced since the incident in 2010. Facebook acknowledge the outage, but offered no explanation on the cause of the downtime.
"Earlier this morning, we experienced an issue that prevented people from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time. We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100%. We're sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused," said a Facebook representative in a statement.
A graphic generated by DownRightNow, a site that monitors the server health of popular websites, depicts the roughly half-hour outage that occurred around 4 a.m. EST, along with a much briefer period of downtime at around 1 p.m. EST. The blip on the graphic depicting the 1 p.m. shortage appeared to be roughly five minutes in length.
While the outage early Thursday morning lastly roughly 30 minutes, tweets hashtagged with the words "Facebook" and "Down" swelled to over 70,000. Facebook's short period of downtime ignited humorous jabs from Twitter users.
"Facebook is like a fridge. You keep checking it, but there's nothing good in it," Twitter user IamRanjanDhar stated in a tweet.
Another user took a jab at food bloggers who frequent Facebook.
"Facebook was down for 30 minutes, forcing people to eat their food without photographing it," a Twitter user bearing the handle, "CynicalMother," stated in a tweet.
Facebook's last big outage began when what was released as an enhancement created a 2.5-hour nightmare for Facebook users and engineers. The implementation of new verification software introduced errors into the site's database and caused the site's extensive downtime, according to Robert Johnson, director of Software Engineering at Facebook, who offered details on the 2010 outage.
On Sept. 23, 2010 "we made a change to the persistent copy of a configuration value that was interpreted as invalid. This meant that every single client saw the invalid value and attempted to fix it. Because the fix involves making a query to a cluster of databases, that cluster was quickly overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of queries a second," Johnson stated.
