The current (08/31/2010) downtime of facebook.com really makes me wonder whether the common uncritical use of facebooks api’s and widgets should be reconsidered. Especially as there is no direct communication from facebook about the downtime. Even after a few hours of network problems, there are no news about the cause and possible solutions. The only information is some kind of ‘we are working on it’ statement to mashable. Not good if you are serving some 500 million users around the globe.

Now this may not be a problem for casual facebook users, but it sure is for web professionals. It is common these days to add some of facebook’s dynamic content to customer pages using either facebook xml (fbxml) or iframe widgets (the ‘like button’ being the most popular). All these components suddenly stopped working and worse, due to dns failures, there is no way to get meaningful error messages to the user. Instead they either see a dns resolve error or even some nasty dns hijacking page of their dns provider – not professional at all.

Now i seriously consider reimplementing the facebook features we need on our sites using the facebook api, as this seems to be the only way to perform serious error handling and inform our users about the problem. Still due to the api restrictions and oauth, the like button in it’s current, very user friendly form seems impossible to replace.