Facebook acknowledged on Tuesday afternoon the presence of an internal glitch that left some members with their accounts inaccessible.
"We are currently experiencing a technical issue with one of our databases that is resulting in an extended period of maintenance for some users," a statement e-mailed to CNET News by Facebook spokeswoman Malorie Lucich read. "We are working on a fix now and hope to have this resolved in the next 24 hours."
The member complaints, according to reader e-mails sent to CNET News and comments posted to recent (unrelated) entries on Facebook's company blog, detail an issue in which accounts were rendered inaccessible and replaced by alerts that they were down for maintenance.
Some comments reached levels of borderline hysteria, along the lines of "My original page has been locked since 10/2/09 due to 'site maintenance'. I have contacted FB numerous times and done everything that I have been instructed to do on the site maintenance site... to no avail. PLEASE FB HELP ME."
The "down for maintenance" message is a notice that many of Facebook's 300-million-plus members have seen at one point or another, but in this instance it stuck around for as long as three days, leaving some affected users fearful their accounts had been deleted altogether.
With Facebook acknowledging the problem as a database issue, that likely rules out a malicious activity like the one this summer that saw parts of the site temporarily crippled by a denial-of-service attack.
This article was first published as a blog post on CNET News.
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Facebook acknowledges access problems
They are taking more then 24 hours. I am one of the people and not had facebook since Sunday morning.
Posted by Michael Dey Rhodes on Friday, October 09 2009 02:47 AM