In One Fell Swoop, Facebook Glitch Deep-Sixes the Web
Now we may know how powerful Facebook really is. — On Thursday, many major websites were taken down by an error that stemmed from Facebook, as Internet mainstays like MSNBC.com, CNN, Yelp and New York Magazine all sent users to redirect pages almost immediately upon loading.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook had already exposed the fragility of services tied to its identity systems: a 2010 network glitch disrupted Facebook identity recognition, followed later that year by a bug that disabled user accounts. The February 2013 incident broadens the consequence from Facebook users to publishers and consumer web services that load Facebook-dependent components.
The same outage was carried across a wide range of technology and business outlets, underscoring that Facebook had become shared infrastructure for sites well beyond its own domain.
First-order effects
- CNN, MSNBC.com, Yelp and New York Magazine lose normal page access for visitors when the Facebook-originated error sends users into redirects.
- Facebook’s reliability becomes an operational issue for third-party sites, not solely a service-quality issue for Facebook account holders.
Second-order effects
- Affected publishers and services have reason to isolate or add safeguards around Facebook-loaded functions so a failure in one external integration cannot break page delivery.
- Facebook gains leverage as a distribution and identity dependency, while its engineering failures impose availability costs on the sites that embed its services.
Third-order effects
- If web services continue concentrating social, identity and sharing functions in a few platforms, outages will increasingly behave as cross-site identity failures rather than isolated website problems.
- The episode points toward resilience becoming a competitive requirement for publishers and consumer services that rely on third-party platform infrastructure.
The trend: The web is moving toward platform-dependent architecture, where a fault at a major social service can cascade into unrelated sites’ availability.