Facebook Is Down
Phil_at_EvilNET writes "Jeff Bertolucci of PC World reports: 'Thousands of Facebook users this afternoon (US Pacific Time) are reporting that the popular social networking site is down. It's unclear when the outage began. PCWorld has not been able to reach Facebook for comment, but Mashable reports the company has confirmed the outage.'"
And nothing of value was lost. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Appears to be up as of this moment.
I can't believe this... Facebook went down so I started working and then I actually finished and now I can't figure out what to do!
Okay, I'm not quite that bad, but we all know people who are...
Help me fix my brother's injured butt!
There was a can't resolve DNS error, but it's fixed now.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
My plans for world domination are coming to fruition.
I see a lot of people slamming facebook and social web sites.
They usually do it on some website, while being social.
What makes their comments better than ones on facebook.
I was just using it and then I came here to see this story and then I loaded it and the wall post I made before I saw this story was on my front page so WTFOMGBBQ
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And so we see the second (or third) salvo in the great 21st century Sino-American conflict. China has embargoed our proxy off their shore, we have likely responded in a manner as yet unknown.
But really China? Really? You have to go straight for the jugular and take down Facebook? There will be mass hysteria, cats and dogs will dance the lambada, and blood will rain from the sky now that you've taken down our new national pastime, Facebook.
/adjusts tinfoil hat to a rakish tilt
But really, wouldn't that be a good way for China to demonstrate how easily they can mess with us?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
For the first time ever... mentioning a site was down on ./ made it come back to life.
The smartphone apps never went down as far as I could tell.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Websites go down all the time. Amazon has been down from time to time. Why is this new at all, let alone front page news? I shouldn't just blame slashdot though, both yahoo and cnn mention this as well.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
You mean people will actually spend there day at work... working? awesome
I mean I've always had the impression that facebook is a flaky piece of shit anyway. I don't care since it's stupid trivial chat and games (hey, I like stupid trivial chat and games, but I can just about survive without) and downtime rarely lasts that long.
It was me, i tripped over the servers cord on my way to the bathroom, ive plugged it back in and pressed the button on the front, hope its ok !!
mom
I believe this only affected those of you stuck in the last millennium. http://v6.facebook.com
This is how Zuckerberg is protesting the new Facebook movie- he's keeping everyone from procrastinating, making them all do work. Bastard.
http://twitter.com/m_ahmadinejad/status/24007026734
(j/k of course)
It's been down a lot lately. Although as others have mentioned, it's up again for me now. It's a shame that it's up again, really, although others have mentioned that too. In fact this whole post is redundant. I really shouldn't push submit but in the grand scheme of things, probably my whole life is redundant, so I guess it fits.
Qxe4
my downloads for pr0.... the internets were so fast today.
I then tagged this story as "!omfg", but I realize I was wrong, and for that I apologize. I realize now that I should have just tagged this story "meh".
As soon as the news story broke that Zuckerberg was richer than Jobs, Apple launched EMP weapons at the Facebook datacenters.
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
This has happened before - they have a problem with their DNS servers, and the entire site becomes unreachable.
I gotta wonder who in their right mind sets the TTL of 25 seconds on a major site? What a great way to overload your DNS servers and make your site unreachable when they go down!
Maybe one of the latest commits to Diaspora launched a massive denial of service attack against it :)
Seriously though, it was down for less than 30 minutes, how is this news?
Summation 2
Right, everyone back to myspace.
So I see Slashdot stories on my Facebook feed.
Including the story (on Facebook) of Slashdot commenting that Facebook was down.
Except that it wasn't (or I wouldn't have seen the story)
Holy recursive effect!
"She's furniture with a pulse"
This news gets posted on Slashdot and it goes down again.
Oh my, how I've missed you, the dirty, long tech star troll poster!!! Keep it up! Long live the AC!
PALO ALTO, CA -- Millions of Internet users simultaneously threw up their hands in frustration and disgust Thursday afternoon as Facebook.com, a popular website providing distractions from productivity, inter-personal communication services, and a next-generation forum for thousands of misplaced USENET trolls, blinked off the Interwebs in a bright display of sparks and an anti-orgasmic groan.
Calls to Facebook headquarters were not answered but when the machine picked up, background noises included explosions, people screaming, and a burly man shouting DOS commands in a fierce staccato.
Authorities were put on alert status and reinforcements were called in to deal with the huge amount of LOLs and WTFs that had begun to pile up at intersections, due to the timing corresponding with the release of teenagers from school and their subsequent activities. Counselors were bracing themselves to deal with the myriad of relationships that have been thrust violently into limbo as users have been unable to hook up, break up, get married, or get "into a relationship" with their BFF.
Evan Williams, CEO of the popular sister-site Twitter, said in a statement that they were jumping in to help. "We've brought more servers online to deal with the influx of users who need to update their status, complain about a political party, or notify classmates that they are, 'skanky hors'." Williams also noted that they were partnering with TwitPic and other add-on services to ensure that the steady stream of photos of asses, children doing stupid things, and people drinking in semicircles would be preserved.
Ag secretary Vilsack presented a sober speech Thursday afternoon, lamenting the millions of dollars in crop and animal losses expected from the downtime of Facebook. "We know a lot of virtual farmers out there are hurting, " he stated. "You should know -- we will be here to help you rebuild."
Meanwhile, during the downtime, researchers discovered a rather large blue space available outside of their houses and middle age housewives were said to be seen in states of ecstasy from a natural phenomenon known as, "sunshine".
Blog,Twitter
Your bastion of security and reliability.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
look likes its back
Although they were referring to the entire Internet, not just Facebook - it seems there's less and less of a difference nowadays.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/48hour-internet-outage-plunges-nation-into-product,779/
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
Kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya;
Someone's cryin', Lord, kumbaya;
Someone's singin', Lord, kumbaya;
Kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya;
Oh, Lord, kumbaya.
Kumbaya.
... There's no such thing as too big to fail.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
... does it?
Ahhhhh..... fuuuuuuuuuck.
Oh wait.... I don't have a Facebook account.
A few hours ago, there was a /. post about url redirect issues with facebook, twitter, etc. Many people posted links to nice firefox plugins which would filter some of that. At this point, thousands of people are probably pointing all sorts of interesting script-tweaking plugins at facebook to see what happens.
Maybe thats what happened?
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
What is this "dotslash" of which you speak?
People with soul rejoice all over the world.
"facebook is down" makes top news at nerd related news website
whois facebook.com
Whois Server Version 2.0
Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net/
for detailed information.
FACEBOOK.COM.ZZZZZZ.THE.BEST.WEBHOSTING.AT.WWW.FATUCH.COM
FACEBOOK.COM.ZZZZZ.GET.LAID.AT.WWW.SWINGINGCOMMUNITY.COM
FACEBOOK.COM.ZZZZZ.DOWNLOAD.MOVIE.ONLINE.ZML2.COM
FACEBOOK.COM.MORE.INFO.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
FACEBOOK.COM
If Facebook allowed posting advertisements that can only be accessed with a unique password as was printed on an invitation to a unique bearer, then it would be almost as good as Craigslist.
Craigslist sucks alot more today, and it's quite the COINCIDENCE that ever since EBAY was denied control over Craigslist that now there is more SCAMS on Craigslist that necessitate EBAY to intervene to cause REGISTRATION before posting in the general-selling section of Craigslist.
EBAY and SCAMS somehow go together.
After-all, it was eBay that complained about Craigslist having "untapped...monetary...revenue...potential" that the government somehow would prefer more of this kind of trading to be regulated.
I know, think of what you could do with a day of unfettered productivity!
You could use the time to learn how to use "they're/there/their" properly, for instance.
I'll do it again.
Nuts, it only works as http://www.v6.facebook.com/. Thanks to webmistressrachel for the correction.
That dumb fuck can't even keep his site running.
http://gawker.com/5636765/facebook-ceo-admits-to-calling-users-dumb-fucks
It has been up and down for random intervals since yesterday
1) this is not news
2) I am not surprised its on slashdot, a day late (btw at the time of this posting its working fine for my wife)
Nothing of value was lost to you maybe. But I've got a news flash, the world doesn't revolve around you.
I've got a friend nearing the end of a difficult pregnancy and who is approaching labor, and Facebook is her husband's primary way of keeping friends and family updated as to her condition. That may not be important to you, but to a bunch of people scattered all across the world - it's important as hell. We care about our friends and family and staying in touch with them, in good times and bad.
You may thing you're k3wl and l33t for going with the Slashdot groupthink as to the value of Facebook, but in reality you're self centered and shallow jackass.
[Sigh, I know this is going to get modded 'flamebait' and 'troll', but it had to be said.]
although that makes perfect sense, that's not good news as they're about to be chased off of this one. the thing with the 'elite' amongst us is that they think we came from monkeys & they didn't. telling us to tighten our belts while they're sucking DOWn stuff, & feasting on nubile virgins, while using OUR resources to finance worldwide murder & mayhem. they claim to be doing it in the name of 'god'. as fauxking low as it can go. talk about terrorists, billionerrors, hypenosys etc...
the search continues;
google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=weather+manipulation
google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=bush+cheney+wolfowitz+rumsfeld+wmd+oil+blair+obama+weather+authors
meanwhile (as it may take a while longer to finish wrecking this this place); the corepirate nazi illuminati is always hunting that patch of red on almost everyones' neck. if they cannot find yours (greed, fear ego etc...) then you can go starve. that's their (slippery/slimy) 'platform' now. see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder
never a better time to consult with/trust in our creators. the lights are coming up rapidly all over now. see you there?
greed, fear & ego (in any order) are unprecedented evile's primary weapons. those, along with deception & coercion, helps most of us remain (unwittingly?) dependent on its' life0cidal hired goons' agenda. most of our dwindling resources are being squandered on the 'wars', & continuation of the billionerrors stock markup FraUD/pyramid schemes. nobody ever mentions the real long term costs of those debacles in both life & any notion of prosperity for us, or our children. not to mention the abuse of the consciences of those of us who still have one, & the terminal damage to our atmosphere (see also: manufactured 'weather', hot etc...). see you on the other side of it? the lights are coming up all over now. the fairytail is winding down now. let your conscience be your guide. you can be more helpful than you might have imagined. we now have some choices. meanwhile; don't forget to get a little more oxygen on your brain, & look up in the sky from time to time, starting early in the day. there's lots going on up there.
"The current rate of extinction is around 10 to 100 times the usual background level, and has been elevated above the background level since the Pleistocene. The current extinction rate is more rapid than in any other extinction event in earth history, and 50% of species could be extinct by the end of this century. While the role of humans is unclear in the longer-term extinction pattern, it is clear that factors such as deforestation, habitat destruction, hunting, the introduction of non-native species, pollution and climate change have reduced biodiversity profoundly.' (wiki)
"I think the bottom line is, what kind of a world do you want to leave for your children," Andrew Smith, a professor in the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences, said in a telephone interview. "How impoverished we would be if we lost 25 percent of the world's mammals," said Smith, one of more than 100 co-authors of the report. "Within our lifetime hundreds of species could be lost as a result of our own actions, a frightening sign of what is happening to the ecosystems where they live," added Julia Marton-Lefevre, IUCN director general. "We must now set clear targets for the future to reverse this trend to ensure that our enduring legacy is not to wipe out many of our closest relatives."--
"The wealth of the universe is for me. Every thing is explicable and practical for me .... I am defeated all the time; yet to victory I am born." --emerson
no need to confuse 'religion' with being a spiritual being. our soul purpose here is to care for one another. failing that, we're simply passing through (excess baggage) being distracted/consumed by the guaranteed to fail illusionary trappings of man'kind'. & recently (about 10,000 years ago) it was determined that hoarding
Just make an ad-block filter like so: |http://www.facebook.com/*
If you are unwise enough to want to look at facebook you can whitelist the domain. This way facebook addins are blocked on all sites, save for when you are on facebook itself.
Additionally you can ad-block the entire "social sites buttons" div and everything in it.
Maybe that did it?
Glad I closed it; good riddance. It is a cesspool of narcissism.
That story would have been much more believable if you left out the part about an Asian girlfriend.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
Really, I do
This non-story made TV news services this morning in Australia. It ranked second or third story in the bulletin, even ahead of the football grand finals stories. At least the last bulletin I saw was a little tongue-in-cheek as it reported, "In other news, Australia's workplace output showed the highest one-day improvement in history."
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
:)
Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy...
The fun thing is that Facebook going down slowed down other sites too. I was reading an article at thenation.com which has buttons for sharing on Facebook. The article was three pages, and every time I changed the page it wouldn't load until a request to Facebook (api.ak.facebook.com) timed out, which was about 10 seconds.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Press the refresh button a lot!
I just logged into it with my phone with no issue. I've been getting emails all day of comments from people too. I call BS.
Researchers have determined that a grandmother from Long Island was the person who overloaded and killed Facebook, while trying to congratulate her grand-daughter on a strong effort during a losing soccer match. This post was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
I mean only use facebook ON my phone :)
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Dude, you're not going to believe this - but I've got the solution to your problem. It's a bit bleeding edge and in beta, but it'd totally work for you, I think.
I was just talking to some VCs about it earlier today, even.
It's called a 'cellphone'. Basically, you buy one and sign up for a service plan, and you're assigned a number, usually consisting of ten digits. Other people with a cellphone can 'dial' those digits, and it will connect their phone to your's, and you can talk to them pretty much anywhere in the world. Truly groundbreaking, I know, right?
You should totally look into it. It's going to be the next big thing, I swear. ...Seriously, I'm going to laugh loudly and derisively, rather than shed tears of sadness that someone actually thinks a third-party service they're provided for free is a viable option for critical communication.
Who will click my cow?! HELP!!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Seriously.
For that matter, what the hell am I doing here? I should get back to work...
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Just before it all went haywire, a bunch of my friends started getting videos pasted to their wall "What are you doing?". I am guessing that spawned ever more pastings until it went bonkers.
The videos all pointed to apps.facebook.com but I don't remember and didn't capture the url.
Shortly thereafter the videos were gone, and the postings were gone, so I suspect that they are getting both a handle on the outage, and then shut stuff down while they fix the code.
INTO PRODUCTIVITY.
Is Wiki down, too? I need to find out when Pat Boone's cover of "When I Lost My Mind" was number one and I can't seem to get to anything at Wiki.
Is this a coordinated thing or just an odd congruence?
Crap, now not only can't I goof off on FB, I can't even do work related research on wikipedia. Guess I'll have to find out the solubility of thulium chloride the old fashioned way.
two tickets came into the helpdesk about the "internet being slow" or "the internet is down", only to find out that they just couldn't get to facebook. at work. this is why i can't stand when i have to cover the helpdesk. leave me alone with my machines. also, some network engineer entirely got fired. though i secretly hope they were DoS'd.
Zuckerberg is holding Facebook ransom until everyone promises not to watch the new movie about him
And I'll gladly sign up when I finally have something to sell.
and suddenly status reports everywhere are missing "No Change". Leaving corporations only to blame the sudden increase in productivity on management.
It was right around the same time I heard the sound of hysterical female screaming all around me.
If slashdot hadn't wasted an article to mention it, I'd never have noticed. I dumped using Facebook after the last round of playing whack-a-mole with the ever shifting privacy settings.
I suppose we could go outside or something...
nah.
And Facebook is so buggy that scarcely a day goes by that some basic functionality isn't broken. And it wasn't even down very long.
(not that Slashdot is all that much better. *How* often does the javascript get stuck in a loop?)
must of not been there the other day. dont go on it that much, dont have anything interesting on all of my wall....
In other news a wave of unprecedented Productivity swept through the world... Oh wait, only Facebook is down.
Loads just fine for me here. Has all day.
Good news to hear this today. Facebook is a CIA operation, so every day down is another day of living with one less slimy tentacle poking out of the screen.
Yay...
wake up and hold your nose
9/23/10, the day facebook went down, and everyone remembered they have lives.
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
Email is much less reliable than FB messages. You can never be sure your email won't disappear in some spam filter.
That is one of the main reasons I use FB!
From reports I have been seeing, there are widespread outages and disconnects in a variety of sites. Many games are failing to maintain stable connections. Lots of different sites are failing to load or loading very slowly. I don't think this is just a Facebook issue.
'Thousands of Facebook users this afternoon (US Pacific Time) are reporting that the popular social networking site is down.
Seems that they don't need facebook after all to report meaningless tidbits of their life.
See subject, and it's not looking good for Linux + Apache folks (LAMP): I mean, hey - Facebook's 2nd outage in 24 hours? Come on! I thought Linux and Apache 'never crashed' or had downtime, penguins! You're always ribbing on Windows here saying it's unstable, and yet what's this over at facebook the past 2 days now, hmmm?
When the chips are on the table?? Linux + Apache went DOWN boys!
Now, on the other hand/by way of comparison??
Well - I don't see NASDAQ for example crashing using Windows Server 2003 clusters:
http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=MarketShare
"NASDAQ is renowned for its high performance technology and has proven reliability with 99.999+% uptime. Whats more, firms count on NASDAQ for unsurpassed speed and tested capacity to execute trades quickly and efficiently."
That's what NASDAQ uses as the official "trade data dissemination system" to users there, and it has maintained that kind of uptime, using Windows Server 2003 clusters no less (which being an NT based OS, is like its ancestor before it in VMS, & has clustering, & stable as iron when run this way)
(Just in case anyone doesn't believe that Facebook uses a "LAMP stack", and I am sure this is going to get me "flamed" here or downrated as per usual whenever someone shows that Linux is NOT "impervious" to downtime or crashing??? Take a peek here boys:
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=facebook.com
That'll show you Linux and Apache... and yes, F5's "BIG IP" is just an internet appliance that runs on Linux! See here for that much as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F5_Networks
"F5's BIG-IP product is based on a network appliance (either virtual or physical), which runs F5's Traffic Management Operating System (TMOS), which runs on top of Linux" )
It's hip to be square?
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
There isn't an option to dislike
Whoa, you need to calm down. It was just a joke. Relax.
And maybe you should also understand that it's not about you, that some have opinions that differ from yours, and that you shouldn't dismiss other people opinions as "groupthink" because you disagree with them.
You tell that individual to grow up, but perhaps you should take your own advice.
And yes, you deserve to have that comment modded down.
# slater86 likes Facebook's Status
When people ask if I'm an optimist, I say "I hope so". --Bill Bailey
Whenever the email server crashes at the office, I notice people milling around and talking. You could actually call it "being social". As soon as they all know the server is up, it gets quiet as they return to their email drudgery.
The Facebook outage has shown the opposite effect. Today was remarkably productive.
Maybe there could be a combination of the two. We could call it Facemail.
See subject, and it's not looking good for Linux + Apache folks (LAMP): I mean, hey - Facebook's 2nd outage in 24 hours? Come on!
Hey - the way you "penguinista" around here talk, well, I thought Linux and Apache 'never crashed' or had downtime, penguins!
I mean, You're always ribbing on Windows here saying it's unstable, and yet what's this over at facebook the past 2 days now, hmmm?
When the chips are on the table?? Linux + Apache went DOWN boys!
Now, on the other hand/by way of comparison??
Well - I don't see NASDAQ for example crashing using Windows Server 2003 clusters:
http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=MarketShare
"NASDAQ is renowned for its high performance technology and has proven reliability with 99.999+% uptime. Whats more, firms count on NASDAQ for unsurpassed speed and tested capacity to execute trades quickly and efficiently."
That's what NASDAQ uses as the official "trade data dissemination system" to users there, as well as other systems (bigger iron stuff), and all their systems maintain that kind of uptime under tremendously heavy user & work loads, 24x7!
(Additionally/again, using Windows Server 2003 clusters no less (which being an NT based OS, is like its ancestor before it in VMS, & has clustering, & stable as iron when run this way))
(Just in case anyone doesn't believe that Facebook uses a "LAMP stack", and I am sure this is going to get me "flamed" here or downrated as per usual whenever someone shows that Linux is NOT "impervious" to downtime or crashing??? Take a peek here boys:
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=facebook.com
That'll show you Linux and Apache... and yes, F5's "BIG IP" is just an internet appliance that runs on Linux! See here for that much as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F5_Networks
"F5's BIG-IP product is based on a network appliance (either virtual or physical), which runs F5's Traffic Management Operating System (TMOS), which runs on top of Linux" )
Early today Facebook was down or unreachable for many of you for approximately 2.5 hours. This is the worst outage we've had in over four years, and we wanted to first of all apologize for it. We also wanted to provide much more technical detail on what happened and share one big lesson learned.
The key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition. An automated system for verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed.
The intent of the automated system is to check for configuration values that are invalid in the cache and replace them with updated values from the persistent store. This works well for a transient problem with the cache, but it doesn't work when the persistent store is invalid.
Today we made a change to the persistent copy of a configuration value that was interpreted as invalid. This meant that every single client saw the invalid value and attempted to fix it. Because the fix involves making a query to a cluster of databases, that cluster was quickly overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of queries a second.
To make matters worse, every time a client got an error attempting to query one of the databases it interpreted it as an invalid value, and deleted the corresponding cache key. This meant that even after the original problem had been fixed, the stream of queries continued. As long as the databases failed to service some of the requests, they were causing even more requests to themselves. We had entered a feedback loop that didn't allow the databases to recover. The way to stop the feedback cycle was quite painful - we had to stop all traffic to this database cluster, which meant turning off the site. Once the databases had recovered and the root cause had been fixed, we slowly allowed more people back onto the site.
This got the site back up and running today, and for now we've turned off the system that attempts to correct configuration values. We're exploring new designs for this configuration system following design patterns of other systems at Facebook that deal more gracefully with feedback loops and transient spikes.
We apologize again for the site outage, and we want you to know that we take the performance and reliability of Facebook very seriously.
Stupidity= relying onfree service for critical (finger quotes) comm.
to the sky
-
How crazy is it at facebook today?
Facebook does damage control in response to unflattering movie portrayal (WS Journal, Sept 23)
Zuckerberg donates $100 million to Newark schools to distract (CNN, Sept 23)
Major Facebook outage
Other stuff we don't know?
On top of Paul Ceglia's pending claim on 84% of facebook...
Nice. Somebody mod parent up.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Facebook was down and worldwide productivity went up by 50% :-)
They should start to have Facebook off (Faceoff) days, you know like days without any cars in the cities.
There go my mod points, but fuck it, I can't bear reading this stupidity once more.
E-mail accounts don't change. People change them because they're lazy or stupid.
The same people don't forget their Facebook logins and passwords, do they? Then why do they change e-mail addresses like others change their underwear?
It's often the same people who have a handful of addresses, so you never know which of those they monitor and which they don't, and they will often reply to mail from another address than the one you mailed, regularly from ones you've never heard of before.
Oh, and don't forget those who don't even *know* their correct addresses and tell you some guess instead. I've been the recipient of such mail for years when some gal gave out an address from my domain because she couldn't remember her TLD even if her life depended on it (I have a .de, she was on something else but giving out a .de address to everyone and their dog). She was a very active hotchatter, judging from the "erotic" stories and dick shots I received. The guys usually were quite embarrassed when I replied "nice cock shot, but the stupid fuck doesn't know her own e-mail address - please tell her when you meet her again".
That was in the Old Days(TM) before this was a common spam topic, around when Eternal September started. I never got to know her real e-mail address even though I've really tried. Cornelia. If the German proverb that "stupidity fucks best" holds water, she must be one of the best fucks ever.
But I digress.
Long story short, tell people that e-mail addresses are meant to be permanent and they won't get their pregnancy updates if they change their e-mail address without notifying you. It can be done. I've only met one or two people who didn't at least keep one permanent address around after my explanation. Oh, and be kind. They just don't understand.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
That was modded as funny?
You know, the first part:
Dude, screw her pregnancy man. The kid will come out one way or the other and people will get the news a few days late at best.
deserves to be modded as +5, true.
As to the GP:
You claim you care about family and friends, yet you cannot think of any other way of keeping in touch than Facebook?
Here's a thought: start thinking for yourself for a change.
People cared about each other a long time before "The Intarwebs", and they managed to keep each other up-to-date back then too.
In other words: news flash: the world does not revolve around Facebook either. And if it does for you, it's time to go to a corner, cry your heart out for a while and then start making changes.
(sure I'll be downmodded, and I probably deserve it, but someone refusing to use their brain just annoys the crap out of me. "Oh I'm not being handed everything on a silver platter... WAAAAH!" Grow up, will you? Take friggin charge -- you're about to put a child onto this earth, try to raise them to be moderately self-reliant and not Facebook-reliant, you know...)
as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
The site is not down, there is just DNS cache poisoning,
where it redirects you to some broken site page (maybe with malware in the background???) or so I have heard...
This makes sense to me, as it is not possible that only 1000 users have the site down and the rest are all a-ok...
Ding Dong the witch is dead!
Stan! Poke your Grandma! Poke your Grandma!
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened. "
One could kip on over to MyFace.com, the anti-social site for Narcissists. Perhaps BookSpace.com, the mildly social site for librarians & bookworms, would suit you better? No, this being slashdot, SpaceFace.com, the site celebrating the "face" on Mars and the Eskimo nebula, would probably be best.
Invenio via vel creo
Facebook FINALLY does something about privacy problems, and everyone complains. You just can't make people happy.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I was going to mod you funny, but that would encourage people to read the post you responded to. :\
Since when did it become front-page news when a web site goes down? So it's popular - B.F.D.! It's not as if anything bad will happen. So people will have to wait a couple hours to find out what their 6,249 "friends" had for breakfast. Sheesh.