Facebook Crash Due to Premature Roll Out Of New Features

Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site was downed yesterday after an ‘accidental’ leak exposed some upcoming features on the site.

The site, which accounts for 25% of the world’s internet traffic closed down for nearly 30 minutes after a technician uploaded and made live a list of new features and pages on the public facing site, this included re-jigged photo’s, page management changes and updated brand pages – I bet the member of staff in question got a bit of a tongue lashing after pulling that gaff.

Another one of the updates, codenamed ‘memories’ introduced automatic indexing and collating of wall updates in a sequenced timeline.

Facebook did acknowledge the downtime in an official statement, it read “For a brief period of time, some internal prototypes were made public to a number of people externally.” It went on to add: As a result, we took the site down for a few minutes. It’s back up, and we apologise for the inconvenience.”

Unsurprisingly the social community noticed the ‘blackout’ instantly with millions of people turning to their Twitter profiles to check on what was going on. Some users tried to theorise with a little humour “so facebook is down hmmm, everyone crashed it from being stuck in the snow”.

Did you notice the 30 minute downtime? What do you think of the new ‘pre-released’ features?