Facebook Offline, Briefly, Over Leaked Prototypes

[engine]

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]

[jecasc]

Facebook ist ruining me. I have to pay hundreds of euro every month to people so they pretend to be my friends on facebook so I can keep up the appearance of having a social life.

Just kidding, don't have a facebook account. But if I had one I would update my status to: "was panicked because he could not log into facebook for over 20 minutes oh my god I had to go waste my time elsewehere"

[httpwebwitch]

LOL @jecasc. vocal facebook haters, rejoice.

Did anyone get a screenshot of these leaked prototypes? If you find 'em, post 'em here.

[coopster]

I didn't think of taking a screenshot but I got a sneak peak at the revamped photo section which looks to be headed toward a lightbox-type application.

[SEOMike]

Dang - I regret not taking screeshots of the new profile page and new photos. It looked pretty nice.

The one thing I didn't like was a banner of photos across the top of the profile page because they were pictures that your friends tagged you in, not pictures you choose. The last thing that should be at the top of your profile is some drunken picture your friend took at a party and then posted. At least you can go through and X out the ones you don't want. Big project if you are tagged in hundreds of pictures.

[travelin cat]

I wonder how many millions of dollars of productivity were saved by that 20-30 minutes of down time.

[Hugene]

I wonder what happened to the career of that engineer that "accidently" turned-on the new feature ;)

[carguy84]

I wonder how many millions of dollars of productivity were saved by that 20-30 minutes of down time.

See I think the opposite, how many F5 keys were worn out from constantly refreshing....is it up yet? is it up yet? is it up yet? MY PLANTS ARE DIEING!

[topr8]

>>how many F5 keys

come on, surely the average facebook user has no idea what F5 does?

(although i totally agree with your point)

[Strapworks]

Hopefully instead of hitting refresh for 30 minutes, hopefully some people took the opportunity to go outside, get a breath of fresh air, and a quick reminder that there is a world outside the little screen in front of you.
*what am I thinking!*
They probably just refilled their coffee cup, and went back to hitting refresh for 30 minutes. Then let out a huge sigh of relief when it came back up, only to update their status with "FIRST"

[Walt Stumper]

Dang! F5 is a shortcut for refresh?

Another reason to resubscribe to WebmasterWorld! ;)

[g1smd]

I wonder how many millions of dollars of productivity were saved by that 20-30 minutes of down time.

None.

All that happened was that Twitter filled up with people bitching about Facebook being down.

[maximillianos]

We saw some weird changes to our fan page. Thought they were testing something. Guess it was part of the leaked pages?

[setzer]

I lost ~200 likes on one of my fan pages after it came back up.

[frontpage]

I saw two of the changes.

1) Photos: It using a floating lightbox style with a black background. Did not care for it.

2) If you click on someones name, at the top of the page it provides a mini profile like this.

John Doe graduated from Harvard University and is married to Shelia Socks.

Several users reported having access to a new "Memories" option listed below Photos in the left-hand menu on their Profile Pages.

Facebook Memories introduces a timeline to users’ profiles, showing how many statuses were written each year and how many friends were added, along with a sprinkling of photos to illustrate those changes.

We also found some evidence that Facebook may still be testing a filter for the News Feed called "Outside World."

[GaryK]

2) If you click on someones name, at the top of the page it provides a mini profile like this.
John Doe graduated from Harvard University and is married to Shelia Socks.

Isn't that part of the new and (supposedly) improved profile pages that have been getting rolled-out over the last week.

[BillyS]

I wonder how many millions of dollars of productivity were saved by that 20-30 minutes of down time.

The company I work for just fired someone for spending too much time on FB. Since this was considered misuse of company property, I think collecting an unemployment check is going to be difficult too.

I'm surprised more companies aren't blocking FB. That might pull us out of the recession.

[mediasres]

I wonder if this was related to the brief change in the "like" page that I saw shortly after the new personal profile design came on board. My wife's "like" page appeared for a very short time very much in the new profile design, tho' with the upper tabs moved over to the left column, and the same filmstrip photos at the top. I tweeted the unexpected change, but then it was gone.