Facebook Outage Blamed on DNS Issue

By Damon Poeter
December 10, 2012 10:31pm EST

Facebook on Monday blamed a DNS infrastructure issue for a widespread site outage that lasted between 15 and 25 minutes for some users, according to reports.

The outage, while brief and quickly fixed, generated a flurry of media reports and complaints on other social networks like Twitter. Facebook reached 1 billion active users in October and even short disruptions of service on a site that huge can have substantial ripple effects.

At the very least, they don't go unnoticed.

Here is Facebook's explanation for the outage, which occurred during the early evening and reportedly affected users in North America and Europe, as related by Business Insider:

"Earlier today we made a change to our DNS infrastructure and that change resulted in some people being temporarily unable to reach the site. We detected and resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100 percent. We apologize for any inconvenience."

Those who reported being affected by outage described disruptions ranging from pictures not loading properly to the entire site being unavailable. CNET's Zack Whittaker reportedthat evidence suggested the disruption "was near to or was a global outage," though beta.facebook.com and the mobile version of the site accessed via mobile device apps was reportedly unaffected.

Facebook's back-end problem bookended a rough day for Internet consumer service giants.

Earlier on Monday, Google's Gmail experienced an outage, with some users reporting that the problem extended to the company's Chrome browser and to Google Drive as well.

Gmail started experiencing problems around noon Eastern. At PCMag, Gmail failed to load, and then produced a 502 error page. "The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request," the error noted. "Please try again in 30 seconds. That's all we know."

Google declared the issue resolved just after 1 p.m.

With additional reporting by Chloe Albanesius.



For more from Damon, follow him on Twitter @dpoeter.

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