Facebook Confirms Access Issues
Facebook acknowledged Tuesday afternoon (PDT) that the site is currently experiencing internal glitches that is causing some accounts inaccessible by its members.
According to a statement released by Facebook spokeswoman Malorie Lucich, the company is currently going through technical problems with one of the site’s databases and this is causing the extended maintenance periods for a number of users. Facebook further said that they are currently working on providing a fix to the internal glitch and hopes to get the problem resolved within the next 24 hours.
There have been a number of member complaints posted to Facebook’s company blog over the past few hours. Most of the complaints said that members are unable to access their accounts, and are instead getting pages saying that the pages are down for maintenance. Some of the members also offered details on the issue that they were experiencing with regards to their accounts.
There are even some comments on the Facebook blog that have reached borderline hysteria. A member wrote that his original page was locked since October 2, 2009 because of site maintenance. The same user has reported contacting the social networking website’s managers to inform them of the issue. He has also followed all the support instructions that they have provided and is still encountering the same problem.
The message, ‘down for maintenance’ is a notice that the 300 million plus members of Facebook have encountered at least once. However, in this particular instance, the maintenance concern seems to have lasted three days with many affected users worried that their accounts have already been deleted completely.
With Facebook recognizing that this is a database concern on the hosting server, this rules out the suspicion that this is a malicious attack similar to the one that the social networking service experienced last summer when it was crippled by a denial of service concern.
