Facebook down in second major outage in two months

Following June’s half-hour outage, Facebook collapsed worldwide again.

Facebook’s main site was down worldwide on Friday afternoon, the second major outage in less than two months.


Users began reporting outages shortly after 4pm UK time, but unlike June’s collapse, the failure was spotty at first, with some users reporting continuous access well past 5:15.


Many users of the site were instead confronted with an error page reporting that “the requested URL could not be retrieved”. Coverage was largely restored by 5:40pm.


Facebook said “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”


Sites that use Facebook IDs as login tokens were also affected by the outage, leaving users unable to log in to services such as Skype for the duration of the downtime.


June’s outage was the longest for four years, with the site completely unaccessible for more than 31 minutes. Whether or not this outage counts as longer depends on what time one counts it as starting at.


If you can’t get on Facebook, why not kill time with happier memories, such as the time a fictionalised version of Mark Zuckerberg swore that Facebook would never crash, “ever”.


The guardian.com