Facebook Back Up After Glitchy Afternoon
PALO ALTO (AP) -- A technical glitch blocked or slowed access to Facebook for about four hours Thursday, unplugging many of the social-networking site's 500 million users from the constant flow of updates from their friends.
The problems struck widely, including in the U.S., Europe and South America. But by evening, the site was again running smoothly.
A person with knowledge of the situation said the issue was internal. The person was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter and requested anonymity.
The problem started about 11:05 a.m. PDT, said Vik Chaudhary, a vice president at website monitoring company Keynote Systems. Over the four-hour outage, the site was unavailable to 22 percent of those who tried to access it, Keynote said. Normally, it's available close to 100 percent of the time.
For some, the technical problem upstaged news that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, 26, is donating $100 million to the struggling Newark public school district. The donation is being announced Friday on Oprah Winfrey's TV show.
The Facebook outage came two days after a mischievous hack spread through Twitter, the short messaging site. That attack didn't shut Twitter down but it spread "tweets" of blocked-out text to people's accounts, causing pop-up windows to open on their computer screens.
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