Facebook suffers second outage in as many days

Computerworld - Facebook was struggling today as its popular social networking site went offline for at least 45 minutes Thursday afternoon. It's the second day in a row the popular site has had problems.

As of 3:50 p.m. ET today, the site was back up for some users, but still down for others. A "DNS Failure" message popped up when users tried to access the site.

AlertSite, a Web performance management company, reported that Facebook went down around 2:30 p.m. ET. And between 2:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m., the site only had 38.46% availability. AlertSite also reported that Facebook was down at all 12 of its monitoring locations throughout the U.S.

With half a billion users worldwide, many of them admittedly "addicted" to Facebook, any downtime immediately stirs up a lot of buzz online.

As usual, a lot of users took to Twitter to voice their frustrations. "Facebook is down. In other news, office productivity is up across America," tweeted "MattMooreSC."

The outage occured one day after news leaked that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is donating $100 million to the struggling Newark, N.J. school system. That donation comes just ahead of the Oct. 1 release of The Social Network movie, which chronicles the creation of Facebook and reportedly doesn't always paint Zuckerberg in the best light.

"It seems Facebook is down and Zuckerberg won't bring it back up unless we promise not to see the movie," as e-card company Someecards put it in a tweet.

It's unclear whether the problem today was related to Facebook's problems on Wednesday, when a third-party networking provider took the site down for some users.

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at  @sgaudin or subscribe to Sharon's RSS feed . Her e-mail address is sgaudin@computerworld.com.

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