Summary:
Over the years Facebook has faced a number of outages and downtime causing media attention to these failures. These instances have highlighted the potential fragility of the platform. As Facebook continues growing and becomes more integrated in the lives of individuals, business and corporations, the security of the site is a public matter of great importance.
Allegations:
- A 2007 outage resulted in a security hole that enabled some users to read other users’ personal mail.
- In 2008, the site was inaccessible for about a day, from many locations in many countries. In spite of these occurrences, a study by Pingdom found that Facebook had less downtime in 2008 than most social networking websites.
- On September 16, 2009, Facebook started having major problems with loading when people signed in. On September 18, 2009, Facebook went down for the second time in 2009, the first time being when a group of hackers were deliberately trying to drown out a political speaker who had social networking problems from continuously speaking again the Iranian election results.
Defence:
- Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker gave boilerplate statements which included the usual apologies and assurances that the outage would be repaired as soon as possible without going into the specifics of what caused the "technical issues" in the first place.