Facebook Goes Down In Global Outage. Update: It's Back!
Facebook appears to be a suffering a major outage this morning, with the site unavailable in multiple regions around the world, and Facebook social plug-ins on other websites also acting up. — The Facebook.com site is unavailable …
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook had already maintained a platform live-status page and recovered from a DNS-related U.S. outage in 2013. The June 2014 disruption is broader in reach and extends beyond Facebook.com to social plug-ins embedded across other sites.
That plug-in impact makes availability a dependency issue for publishers and services that use Facebook features, not solely an interruption for Facebook users.
First-order effects
- Facebook users and sites relying on Facebook social plug-ins lose access to the service and related on-page functionality during the outage.
Second-order effects
- Publishers and other third-party sites using Facebook plug-ins must absorb broken social features without control over the underlying service or its restoration timeline.
Third-order effects
- Repeated service failures would make Facebook's platform status and resilience part of the operating risk for businesses that embed its identity and social layers.
The trend: As major web platforms extend functionality beyond their own domains, their outages increasingly become outages for dependent third-party sites.