Facebook Breaks Major Websites With Redirection Bug

johnsnails writes "Some of the biggest news sites in the world disappeared yesterday when Facebook took over the internet with a redirection bug. Visitors to sites such as The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, the Gawker network, NBC News and News.com.au were immediately transferred to a Facebook error page upon loading their intended site. It was fixed quickly, and Facebook provided this statement: 'For a short period of time, there was a bug that redirected people logging in with Facebook from third party sites to Facebook.com. The issue was quickly resolved, and Login with Facebook is now working as usual.'"

Comments

It Has Its Ups and Downs

[eldavojohn]

can we please stop relying on third parties for things *you* should be providing to your users.

Clearly it has benefits and disadvantages. One of the disadvantages is displayed in this story. I could name a decent amount of benefits though: 1) you don't have to register again and again every time you want to use some site. 2) you don't suffer from password fatigue. 3) you don't have to worry about no talent ass clowns storing your username and password in plaintext (although you do have to worry about facebook being no talent ass clowns about that). 4) if I just want to stand up a quick little site that is nothing more than CRUD associated to users then all that login stuff can be offloaded to facebook or whomever. 5) from a large corporation standpoint, you can now get additional social data about your users from the facebook api (I know, this isn't necessarily an advantage for the end user and is best viewed as double edged).

Are you opposed to openID too?

Re:It Has Its Ups and Downs

[whargoul]

...what else is so ubiquitous as to be a reasonable option that also doesnt suffer the same essential problems (certainly not a google account?)

I use Twitter when the option is available only because they don't collect data on me like facebook does. If it's facebook only, I usually won't sign up.