DNS - Facebook Back Up Following Wednesday Crash

Thousands of Americans were unable to access their Facebook (News - Alert) accounts for an extended period of time yesterday after an outside technical problem caused the social networking site to suffer intermittent outages.

"We are experiencing an issue with a third-party networking provider that is causing problems for some people trying to connect to Facebook," officials with the California-based company told the AFP.

"We are in contact with this provider in order to explore what can be done to resolve the issue. In the meantime, we are working on deploying changes to bypass the affected connections.”

Later on Wednesday the social networking giant announced that the unnamed third party provider had fixed the issue and complete accessibility to the site had returned.

Apparently, the outage only affected people in certain regions of the U.S. Those residing in Phoenix, Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston and Fort Lauderdale reported having the most difficulty logging into their account.

While company authorities did not make public how many users were unable to access their page, AlertSite, a website performance-monitoring company, reported that Facebook was only achieving 76.19% availability rate at one point on Wednesday afternoon.

Due to the popularity of the social networking site, news of the outage quickly spread across other communication mediums, including Twitter.

“BREAKING WORK TIP: Do not be the first one in your office to announce that Facebook is down,” tweeted one user, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In related news, Facebook announced earlier this week that it will be adding a new option for processing friend requests. In the near future, users will no longer be forced to accept or ignore a friend request, but instead will be able to click a “Not Now” button, moving the request to a separate menu that can be accessed later.

Facebook officials have not yet released details of when the new option will be launched.

Beecher Tuttle is a Web Editor for TMCnet. He has extensive experience writing and editing for print publications and online news websites. He has specialized in a variety of industries, including health care technology, politics and education. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Beecher Tuttle