engine - 9:46 am on Dec 17, 2010 (gmt 0)

Facebook Offline Briefly Over Leaked Prototypes [bbc.co.uk]

Facebook was forced to take itself offline after a staff member accidentally leaked internal product prototypes. The social network was unreachable for about 20-30 minutes while the mess was cleared up. The outage happened as the site introduced redesigned brand pages, a revamped photos section and a new page management feature. In a statement on its blog, Facebook apologised for the brief downtime. "For a brief period of time, some internal prototypes were made public to a number of people externally." read the message. "As a result, we took the site down for a few minutes. It's back up, and we apologise for the inconvenience."

[edited by: coopster at 2:36 pm (utc) on Dec 17, 2010]