Facebook goes down for some, but not due to an attack

Facebook went down for a while between last night and today, taking a few much-needed, well deserved moments of rest from an unrelenting Internet.

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Put somewhat differently, the company’s servers and/or software caved at one of the worst possible moments, perhaps leading to yet another dip in the newly public company’s stock price, which sits at $27.84 as of this writing.

Widespread service disruptions have been popping up since yesterday evening, as this graph from DownRightNow shows:

What we do know is that the downtime wasn’t the result of an outside attack or DDoS event or Anonymous-led exploit, as you may have read elsewhere on the web.

Our sources close to the matter tell us this has more to do with one of the thousands of routine code updates Facebook pushes every single week. When you think about it that way, it’s more surprising that the world’s largest, most active social network doesn’t have more downtime than it does.

The outage is being called a service disruption that affected a large number of Facebook users for an hour or longer last night and for about the same amount of time today. For others, Facebook has been merely slow to load.