If you can’t use Facebook or Facebook-related functionality around the web, you’re not alone: the site is currently experiencing widespread intermittent outages.
The “Like” button function is also borked at the moment, which is having a ripple effect on the internet at large. (Anecdotally, merely opening Facebook seemed to prompt my browser to download a strange, “Like” associated text file to my desktop.) . Most of the information about the outage currently is coming from the throngs of Facebooted users complaining on Twitter. ReadWriteWeb said:
@RWW Even Like buttons are down on Facebook. We can’t live in a world where we can’t arbitrarily like things. The end is nigh. #FacebookDown
There’s no official word on the latest outage coming from Facebook, but according to Mashable , the most recent outages were due to a “third party networking provider”:
“We are experiencing an issue with a third party networking provider that is causing problems for some people trying to connect to Facebook,” the company told Mashable in a statement. “We are in contact with this provider in order to explore what can be done to resolve the issue. In the meantime, we are working on deploying changes to bypass the affected connections.”
Update: Facebook is completely down as of 4:30 pm EST, and is returning a DNS error on login attempts. The current second highest trending topic on Twitter is “Facebook isn’t working.”
