UPDATED: Facebook Hit By Extended Outage In Several Countries

Facebook is back online for everyone, according to Downrightnow and the company. A spokesperson said:

Earlier today we experienced a DNS issue that briefly prevented people who typed ‘facebook.com’ into their browsers from reaching the site. People who accessed the site using a mobile app, typed ‘www.facebook.com<http://www.facebook.com/>’ into their browsers, or used a bookmark or a search engine to navigate to the site were not affected. We resolved the issue quickly, and the fix should be fully propagated now. We apologize for any inconvenience.

If your Facebook seems like it’s a bit quiet just now, don’t worry that you have been subjected to a mass defriending. Real-time updates about baby poop and your friends’ feelings about their favorite TED videos will return just as soon as the social media platform deals with an outage that’s been affecting some users in different countries, including the U.S. (New York City, Florida, Tennessee and Seattle), the U.K. and Argentina.

Downrightnow confirms the outage, stating that Facebook is experiencing a “likely service disruption” that started at around 7AM Pacific Standard Time. (ReadWriteWeb notes that attempting to access Facebook with the “www” prefix resolves the problem, while the “facebook.com” root domain continues to experience issues. In addition, it appears that Chrome users are disproportionately affected by the outage.)

Facebook Outage

Facebook is usually reliable–at least relative to other social media sites like Tumblr or Twitter–but it has been hit by several outages in the last few months. In December, Facebook was down twice in as many weeks. An issue in Facebook’s service routing layer lead to 20 minutes of downtime in November, and in October and May, outages led to concerns that the site had been hacked (which Facebook denied). The social media network’s ubiquity means that it’s not just users who are inconvenienced–past outages have lead to significant slowdowns in traffic for media and e-commerce Web sites.