Facebook’s power at their headquarters in Palo Alto has been shut down following a small plane crash in Palo Alto. Facebook updated their own Wall a few minutes after 9 am PST stating that power is out in the city of Palo Alto. According to Facebook’s own status update, the power outage is not affecting the Facebook.com website, so users are supposedly not affected, only the employees at Facebook’s headquarters.

However, @fishofthebay on Twitter says “Unfortunately, Facebook chat is still broken and no one’s at work to fix it.” (Chat appears to working at the time of this writing.) Additional tweets (search for “Palo Alto”) are linking to articles that say some homes are on fire and that 3 people are dead.

The story so far is that a twin-engine Cessna crashed in an East Palo Alto, California, neighborhood shortly after takeoff. KTVU.com reports that the plane exploded on impact. One of the homes hit has a daycare center; however, no children were present at the time of the crash. No injuries have been reported on the ground. Tech Trader Daily has a few updates saying that the plane clipped a power transmission tower before the crash. As a result, there seem to be some scattered power outages in nearby Menlo Park and Mountain View. Stanford Hospital is possibly running on backup power.

In spite of the tragedy, an amusing comment thread is developing under the status update, where some wags are taking the opportunity to comment on their distaste for the latest Facebook home page updates. A few are speculating that the power outage might reset Facebook.com back to the previous version.