Facebook Down: What's Up?

“Facebook is down…so what?” A tweet in my twitter feed clarified why I was unable to access my Facebook account a while ago. The other day when Twitter had been hit by a virus of some sort, it was a Facebook friend who brought the issue to my attention first. Next steps included trying to log on or read about it on some news site. Somehow I find myself relying more on my social networks than any other news source or medium of communication. So, it’s not-so “so what!”

The problem is that at that very moment I needed to wish a friend for her birthday, find out the address of an event I am going to tonight and accept a friend request of my new “BFF” (best friends forever) whom I met at my new job today! I realised none of this information was available to me if Facebook hadn’t sprung back to life. Yesterday, the social media site was experiencing problems due to third-party network provider issues and I found myself very perturbed being unable to communicate. And it was important I did because most of my professional contacts live on this site now. Eeek!

This afternoon, Facebook reported latency issues with its API on its developer site, but according to some the problem is clearly broader than that with thousands of users tweeting about the issue, just as I saw with the people I follow on Twitter. Some technology sites report that the error message says: “Internal Server Error – The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.” Also, Facebook “Like” buttons seem to be down on various sites where posts are shared across the Web.

Now here is a lesson on technical issues with your Internet. For those who haven’t any background in ‘geekdom’ (sadly, I do) according to Wikipedia: “An application programming interface (API) is aninterface implemented by a software program that enables it to interact with other software. It facilitates interaction between different software programs similar to the way the user interfacefacilitates interaction between humans and computers.” Right. So…

Further explained:

The practice of publishing APIs has allowed web communities to create an open architecture for sharing content and data between communities and applications. In this way, content that is created in one place can be dynamically posted and updated in multiple locations on the web. (courtesy, Wikipedia)

I. Photos can be shared from sites like Flickr and Photobucket to social network sites like Facebookand MySpace.

II. Content can be embedded, e.g. embedding a presentation from SlideShare on a LinkedIn profile.

III. Content can be dynamically posted. Sharing live comments made on Twitter with a Facebook account, for example, is enabled by their APIs.

IV. Video content can be embedded on sites which are served by another host.

V. User information can be shared from web communities to outside applications, delivering new functionality to the web community that shares its user data via an open API. One of the best examples of this is the Facebook Application platform. Another is the Open Social platform such as Diaspora.

Kudos to Wikipedia for putting this together because I learnt a great deal about how this whole thing operates. Hope you did too. Jumping onto the next stated problem:

As far as what “500: Internal Server Error” means, there is a list of errors and their codes on Wikipedia list of HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) response status codes and you’re welcome to knock yourself out.

What Facebook was sending out was the Internal Server Error which basically is: “A generic error message, given when no more specific message is suitable.”

So that’s it? Really, is that all I get for freaking out because there is so much of my life on this social site and I don’t even share that much. Facebook doesn’t want to say or just didn’t know what it was. Which means we need to be more careful with the information that lives on these social media networks, as we have to come to rely heavily on them. Basically just like anything else, things go haywire in the tech world except we don’t realise the repercussions of these until it affects our daily lives. 

My friend jokes that she posts pictures on Facebook, saves them on her computer and makes prints in case she suffers from Amnesia some day. Therefore, she must chronicle her life to re-live it all! Perhaps it seems somewhat paranoid but is actually very intelligent of her to have a backup. Although, I hope Facebook has a good backup system too!

Photo Credit: daveynin

Original Source: www.justmeans.com/Facebook-Down-What-s-Up/32174.html