The Internet Failed This Morning Because of Facebook

You may have gotten a redirect to a Facebook error message when you're accessing DailySocial this morning, or even other websites as well. There hasn't been any work done on the website between yesterday and today so our suspicion lies with an issue with Facebook. Sure enough, according to The Next Web, it's Facebook Connect that's been pushing people to Facebook when they access websites.

It seems to have been fixed within minutes of us finding out about it but before it affected millions of web pages that are connected to Facebook using Connect. Initially we thought it was something to do with Facebook comments but it also happened on our main page as well.

If you saw the redirect, you would probably have done one of two things, go back to the page you were looking at or hit the Okay button on that error message. Hitting the Okay button takes you to a blank page while reloading the previous page would show you the page you wanted, but as soon as the script for Facebook Connect loads on that page, you'll get redirected again and the loop repeats.

Twitter exploded with people complaining about the issue, some thinking that it was the page they were looking at, others and eventually all, pointed fingers at Facebook, blaming them for the unwanted redirect. People are rioting, burning things, shouting the end of the world… oh wait, that's when San Francisco Giants won the "World" Series Baseball championship last year.

When people can't log in to sites like Pinterest because of an issue with Facebook, it shows how fragile it can be relying on a third party service to log in to a site or service. Apps like Harpoen which rely on Facebook Connect for people to log in would be caught in an unescapable error until the issue gets fixed.

Until that error happens again, with Facebook or other services, people can probably rest easy since it has been fixed but developers and site owners may want to rethink about relying on third party services to provide essential features on their own. Admittedly, it can be so much more convenient to build things from ready-made tools created and provided by third party services but when issues like this happen, there's not a lot you can do about it. Not all companies are prepared or have resources to deal with a third party meltdown.

Facebook has issued a statement about this mishap but refrained from explaining what happened nor did it issue an apology.

For a short period of time, there was a bug that redirected people logging in with Facebook from third party sites to Facebook.com.  The issue was quickly resolved, and Login with Facebook is now working as usual.

We would like to thank @pitra for alerting us of the issue.