17 Comments »
Want to find out which of your friends are busy wasting their day away on Facebook? Unfortunately you’ll have to hold off on that as Facebook chat currently says that it’s “down for maintenance”. The issues, which began appearing earlier in the day, appeared to be related to the service becoming unreliable. Users would visit a page only to notice that the chat service was no longer functioning properly.
One person we spoke to who was in the midst of conversation with a future lover, told us, “Simply put, I don’t know if we’ll ever be together again” as tears began to roll down his eyes. Alright, maybe that didn’t really happen, however reliability is something which Facebook prides itself on. Keeping a service which is used by over 300 million people presents a number of challenges to say the least.
While we’ve seen the chat service have issues before, this is the first time we’ve seen chat down for any extended period of time. Thankfully users still have Twitter, AIM, GChat, and other services for communicating with each other. In a world of instant communication, having our primary channels shut off can damage productivity (or help depending on the channel), but for most users I’d assume Facebook chat is not their primary communication channel.
While we’re not quite sure how long the service will be out for, I’m sure that Facebook is working quickly to resolve the issues. I’ve reached out to Facebook for comment and will be sure to post an update if we hear back.
Update
Facebook has reached out to us with the following comment: “We’ve temporarily turned off Chat while we perform some site maintenance. We’re working as quickly as possible and Chat will be enabled again shortly.” Sounds pretty standard, so we’ll have to wait and see how long the outage lasts.
Update 2
Chat is back up!
this is fucking ridiculous. my friend is across the world and i barely ever get to talk to him, and hes online right now, yet its down for maintenance? like fuck, just leave the damn fb chat alone! its fine.
I love it when major websites take things down to repair them. It shows you how good they really are. This is almost as good as Google taking search down for maintenance.
Frustrating isn’t it I wish they would post a warning before hand with an estimated length of downtime some of us may well be trying to speak to future lovers hint hint
I’m not happy about the sudden failure, I use it as my main chat client, I was in the middles of a fairly important conversation with my sister. We switched to another medium, but I have to say facebook, is not doing it for me much anymore. The new privacy options are great, but when I post on my wall I’d like to be able to select what group sees my wall post for individual posts, ie That was a rough presentation, great work keeping people focused on the task at hand! Only goes to co-workers groups! Just woke up (2pm on a sunday) NOT WORK RELATED! Facebook needs lot’s of polishing before I use it full time!
I ‘like’ this!
Good its coming back up soon
seems to be back online
shit facebook
Ok ! hope will fix it soon and have some new cool options !
Chat is back for me!
I love loads of people on Facebook, I ate a sandwich with half a cow in it and now have chest pains, so I’m taking this opportunity to tell the poeple I love that I do love them and the people I don’t love, that, I hate them
Really facebook is about to going make update some thing new.
i still cant get on to facebook chat. it says the site is broken. i dont see where they fixed anything.
Does anybody know, why I cannot see “older postings” on my fan-page?
well it works good chat,but some time we needed to know for the time we needed.But some time people don’t think’s right things on their mind to give any question to answer.some how do they have no interested at all for fun fairjust being needed open open mind,But the whole world read all the comment we type.Just we have lot of interest.This is my hoppy,Depend on how people treated good bad manner of their attidude behavior.I’t seemed to me really people have little confusing on their mind what to say.Just needed more fun able life to forward every day life.
You people are all retards. Its real easy to throw out complaints about how bad facebook is and how they suck because their chat stopped working for a day. Get a life you idiots. There are tons of IM’s out there, maybe get one as a back up if your “whole life” revolves around talking to your friend that is online RIGHT NOW.
Try being an admin for a site like that with that much functionality and then let me hear you complain about how unreliable it is. I would say all things considered, Facebook has done a pretty damn good job of being online and running smoothly.
You morons just need to get a life, try email or maybe a telephone, remember those??
Idiots, all of you…….
Well, facebook chat hasn’t worked on my computer since they took it down, they really need to sort it out as it keeps crashing my system every time i talk to people, and if someone talks to me… bang whole system freezes luckily i have been having a lazy couple of days or i would have lost a load of work.
I am getting extremely fed up with Facebook…can someone explain to me why my son and husband can get online but mine is supposedly going thru maintenance?? ALL my stuff has gone to waste because of this…I am sick of it and would rather cancel my acct than to waste my time building something they always seem to destroy. Again everyone can get on but me