Jokes abound regarding yesterday’s Facebook outage, but apparently like Microsoft’s Windows, rebooting is almost always the solution to the problem.
Facebook was down yesterday for around two and a half hours. Ironically, the error was caused by an automatic error-correcting system.
The outage, considered to be the worst in over four years, left users with only limited options for exchanging banalities and letting others know what mindless crap they like.
Farms left unattended for such a large timeframe faced massive losses and casualties while Farmville’s Facebook portal was unavailable.
The problem occurred when Facebook’s content distribution network duplicated an error across the system which initiated a callback request to the main site. The resulting traffic effectively took the system offline.
Facebook says the solution to the problem was drastic but necessary – they pulled the plug and restarted the entire system.
