It appears that the excitement over the Facebook IPO has crashed the SEC’s website. The link to the Facebook SEC filing, previously available here, is no longer loading. Instead, we’re seeing a “this webpage is not available message” when attempting to load the site using Google’s Chrome web browser, and similar errors in other browsers. This has gone on for several minutes now, as everyone is clicking through to read the filing. That’s too bad for anyone coming late to the news – you’ll have to wait for those who already had it loaded up on their screens to tell you what it said.

For what it’s worth, the entire SEC.gov website is not down – the main page still loads. But when you click into the EDGAR section, things start to slow down quite a bit. For example, try doing a search for company filings. Click, then wait and wait.

Update: The page is loading again now, but slowly. In fact, it’s been loading for many minutes now and has not finished downloading content. We wouldn’t be surprised to see it up and down throughout the day and more news hits.

This is all clearly a coordinated DDoS on the SEC’s website by Facebook wrapped in the guise of an S-1 filing. Very smart.

— MG Siegler (@parislemon) February 1, 2012