Facebook has now gone down three times this month

At about 12:00 p.m. PDT today (3:00 p.m. EDT), Facebook went down. This is the third time the social network has gone down this month.

VB staff from across the world confirmed they either couldn’t reach the social network or it was incredibly slow. The generic “Service Unavailable” and “Sorry, something went wrong.” errors showed up, as did another generic “Page not found” message. A quick check at DownForEveryoneOrJustMe confirmed the issue was widespread: “It’s not just you! http://facebook.com looks down from here.”

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It’s always news when Facebook goes down, because the service is so incredibly reliable. But three times in the span of 11 days? That’s unprecedented.

To be clear, as I write this article, Facebook is still accessible for some and is failing for others. But even if it does load, it’s incredibly slow or doesn’t load the page completely (Update: Now it seems down for everyone).

The first outage lasted an average of five minutes for most users. The second one took about 10 minutes to fix. Today’s outage appears to be the longest by far, though there are periods where it appears the site is working again.

Most importantly, Facebook is still refusing requests for an explanation. Both on September 17 and September 24, we asked the company what had caused each of the outages. We sent out a request today as well, though at this rate, we’re not expecting a reply.

This is getting ridiculous. Much like Google, Facebook is seen as a site that never goes down. The three outages in September 2015, however, are seriously putting its reliability into question.

Update at 12:10 p.m. PST: Facebook has confirmed the problem via its developer site. “A Facebook-wide issue is causing the Facebook Graph API to be temporarily unavailable. We’re working with our core infrastructure teams to identify the issue and will update you when we have more information.”

Of course it’s more than just the Graph API, but at least the company is finally acknowledging the existence of an issue.

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Update at 1:00 p.m. PST: Facebook is back, though some users are still experiencing problems. We’re still waiting for an official statement, but it appears that the downtime this time last for about an hour.

Update at 1:02 p.m. PST: Facebook says it has a fix ready for the Graph API issue. “We have identified the issue and are in the process of pushing the fix.”

Update at 1:05 p.m. PST: “We’re currently restoring Facebook services that people had trouble accessing earlier today due to a configuration issue,” a Facebook spokesperson told VentureBeat. “We’re working to bring things back to normal for everyone. We apologize to those who have been inconvenienced.”