Third outage in 2 wks hits Facebook

facebook strikes IBM ad dealFacebook has got some explaining to do to its major advertisers after the social network site suffered its third outage in less than a fortnight – and the second in a week – with tens of millions of users unable to access the site last night.
The 40-minute outage hit the site on an international scale, with both UK and US markets particularly affected; it has 1.5 billion users worldwide.
Those who did manage to get on the site were greeted with an error message that read “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”
The timing of the latest issue is hardly ideal. Just yesterday, the company unveiled a new scheme which allows advertisers to use a so-called total rating point (TRP) metric to plan, buy and measure Facebook video ads alongside their TV ads.
This is linked to Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings measurement system which can verify Facebook’s in-target TRP delivery, and Nielsen’s Total Ad Ratings system can verify the TRP delivery for Facebook and TV combined. Its latest figures shows that ad revenues are just over $3.5bn (£2.3bn), with 76% of that through mobile.
Company shares were down nearly 4% at $89.25 (£58.83) shortly after the site went down. It also crashed on September 17 and 24.
A post-mortem, posted by an engineer at the company, said the problem was with its core system, which allows posts, photos, and feeds to be connected.
“We are currently restoring Facebook services that people had trouble accessing earlier today due to a configuration,” said a Facebook spokesman.

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