Thursday 23rd September saw "the worst outage [facebook have] had in over four years", which was declared in an official blog post published later the same day. For many users the site slowed right down to a stubborn crawl as a technical glitch blocked or hindered access to Facebook for several hours, which cut off many of the 500 million users from logging in altogether, causing widespread social networking panic!

At first the problem seemed unclear and speculation was rife. It seemed that DNS lookups on the domain and associated IP addresses worked, but the connection failed. At least their domain registration was safe though, registered till 2020 – no danger there!

The company blamed a bug in some of the software used that caused a number of the supporting databases to be overwhelmed. Facebook claimed it eventually had to shut down the entire site to halt traffic to the databases and fix the problem. According to official comment from Facebook the problem persisted for around two and half hours, and they moved to correct it swiftly to restore the site.

The company quickly released the following statement to alert flustered users that they were experiencing problems: "We're currently experiencing some site issues causing Facebook to be slow or unavailable for some users. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible."

Despite the quick turnaround time several people were left high and dry by the outage, realising how completely dependent they had become on the social networking site. Twitter came alive with frustrated tweets about people not being able to access vital contacts or upload event information to the site, which they had quickly come to rely on. The jokes were rife too, with several people commenting that bosses everywhere would be rejoicing as work productivity would be finally be restored to normal!

Considering our every day reliance on the social network it’s unsurprising that any tiny hiccup has a ripple effect. The Facebook platform is used by more than 1 million developers and entrepreneurs from over 180 different countries and over 1 million websites are currently integrated with Facebook. In August alone, Facebook.com racked up 41.1 million minutes of Internet surfing time in the United States, many of which were within supposed working hours!

The Great Facebook Outage of 2010 comes at a time when Facebook is in the spotlight for a number of other reasons, with October 1st being the release of “The Social Network”, a movie that paints a less than complimentary picture of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. Despite any negative press however it was announced earlier this week that he is now the 35th richest man in the world at only 26, having surpassed both Rupert Murdoch and Steve Jobs on the Forbes Rich list.