The Facebook Newsfeed Breaks
Posted by Nick O'Neill on April 15th, 2008 11:51 AM
It appears as though Facebook is having some problems with handling their newsfeed. It appears that nobody’s newsfeed has been updated since yesterday. Jeremy Wagstaff first reported the failur on his blog. For those that are addicted to their newsfeed, there is no news for you today unfortunately! Is this a sign that Facebook is already making changes to the mini-feed filtering that we reported about last night?
Probably not, but if so that would be an insanely quick turnaround. I’m not sure the last time that my Facebook newsfeed wasn’t working but then again, checking out my newsfeed may have become so ingrained in my daily life that I stopped paying attention to it. Whatever the case, the newsfeed is not updating and users around the globe are going crazy! To the people that noticed their newsfeed not working, I have a solution: take a short break from Facebook!
The newsfeed has become the central feature for Facebook, informing users of what’s going on in their entire social graph. For Facebook’s core feature to go down is substantial. The pages appear to be cached though so I am confident that Facebook is working hard to resolve the issue. When did Facebook’s newsfeed become a valuable part of your daily content consumption? Do you read more Facebook newsfeed or traditional news sources?
April 15th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
I had a day without updates, followed by a brief update overnight and no more updates since. The only new news I’m getting on that page is in the mini “status updates” bit with your friends’ last 3 updates in it.
I notice that the little tick/cross icons next to news items have gone for a burton as well. It’s hard to say if they’ve decided against them permanently or if they’ve just gone on holiday. The same goes for the FOAF suggestions feature which seemingly vanished on Sunday UK time.
April 15th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Yeah, I’ve noticed my newsfeed no longer has the “thumbs up / X” icons in the upper right - a sample screen capture demonstrates this. It’s really a shame, since I use that red X to hide people’s inane stuff that still manages to show up nearly every time I log in.
April 15th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
What I noticed this morning was the thumbs-up/X buttons were no longer there. When I reported it, Facebook support wrote back saying “Unfortunately, the functionality you are requesting is not currently available. We have removed these options to reduce clutter on the site.” Even tho it’s still listed in the help: http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=138
Personally, I liked the voting, and found it useful, particularly in helping me quickly tell which news items were new. And I didn’t find it cluttering at all. Ah well.
April 15th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
There is also no X V on every newsfeed item anymore…
And they have been playing around with changing the “message” link under the profile picture, they changed it to “Message XXX” and several days ago changed it back to “Send XXX a message”.
April 15th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
My newsfeed is working fine, and seems to have no downtime whatsoever.
April 15th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
My News Feed is broken..the same for the news feed of my wife and some friends i checked…
April 15th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Mine is still broken. Nothing new all day.
April 28th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Mine just broke:( Starting Sat night, the only thing published on my newsfeed is stuff posted on my profile by others (i.e. wall posts, etc).