Facebook Connect Bug Takes Down Entire Internet (Almost)

It's official: Facebook has a hold on the internet, and when the social network has a problem, the entire internet will suffer. Case in point: Facebook's Connect feature experienced issues yesterday that affected thousands of other website who use Facebook's integrated "Like" button system on their websites.

The error would occur when users tried to access certain websites and were automatically redirected to Facebook with an error page. This made it so that users couldn't get access to a website unless they were logged out of Facebook. Some of the websites that were affected include CNN, Washington Post, Gawker Media sites, Yelp, and ESPN.

The bug seemed to only last a few minutes, but that didn't stop the shortage of reports of users trying to access a certain website. Facebook didn't say what caused the bug, nor did they provide any vague answers, but they simply announced that they were aware of the problem and made sure that the issue was "quickly resolved."

This isn't the only time that one service has taken down an entire network of websites. Amazon's web services are used by a number of popular websites, including Reddit and Netflix. When Amazon experienced an outage back in October, all of the website that ran off the the company's web servers were taken down. It just goes to show that there are a lot of websites that rely on one single service, and if something minor happens, it can cause major results.

[via The Washington Post]