Not only is it down, but it's redirecting everyone who visits a site with FB Connect on it to this error page. For example: <a href="http://www.economist.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.economist.com</a>
A perfect case study in why the current practice of "just add a script tag with 'facebook.com/whatever.js' into your page and all your LIKE buttons will work magically!" is an absolutely terrible idea.
I just removed the FB connect code from Pen.io - Causing automatic redirects for all logged in users. Luckily it was easy to kill for us and won't cause users any issue with logging in.
Should we be surprised?<p>Facebook Connect was deprecated in 2010<p><a href="http://mashable.com/2010/04/21/facebook-kills-facebook-connect/" rel="nofollow">http://mashable.com/2010/04/21/facebook-kills-facebook-conne...</a>
They just fixed. I saw the same problem on zendesk (video attached):
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5185484" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5185484</a>
This outage goes to show that a lot of people who have implemented Facebook Connect are doing it wrong. If the only way people can login to your website or application is via Facebook then you deserve every bit of downtime you get (cynical, but true). You should never solely rely third party service at any time, regardless of how big to fail they appear to be. Always allow a user to login more ways than one.
Facebook logins for mobile web pages is also failing for many users (which Facebook considers "Priority: Low"). Facebook has been having serious blocking issues for days.<p><a href="https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/331103197009388" rel="nofollow">https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/331103197009388</a>
This might be because of - February 2013 Breaking Changes Now Live
<a href="https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2013/02/06/platform-updates--operation-developer-love/" rel="nofollow">https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2013/02/06/platfor...</a><p>And, they are surely breaking.
Fitocracy had this earlier.<p>I poked around a bit. When you include Facebook's JS, it calls on a PHP file which (inter alia) returns a <meta> tag with a redirection instruction taking you to the broken page.
As pointed out in the previous post, you should not rely 100% on Facebook as your Auth gateway. You should have an alternative for your users to login in case of something like this happens.
See <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5185600" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5185600</a>. Every page with a FB Like button on it went to that FB error page.
Does this only affect those logged in to Facebook? I quit Facebook for a year so I'm not sure whether it is fixed or whether I was just not bothered by it at all
I'm surprised the redirect loop can even happen. Seems malicious. Another example: <a href="http://www.usatoday.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.usatoday.com</a>
Again, building large things on big proprietary services is a bad idea unless you understand what you're getting into.<p>I can almost guarantee that the folks that implemented FB connect didn't understand that the failure mode could forward all traffic to FB. I have no idea how that could become a rational design decision.
Appears to be "fixed" now. Economist.com no longer redirects. FB's own developer pages (<a href="https://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/" rel="nofollow">https://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/</a>) used to manifest this too, and no longer do.
It's been fixed. The status page doesn't mention the blip though: <a href="http://developers.facebook.com/live_status/" rel="nofollow">http://developers.facebook.com/live_status/</a>
This pushed us to implement a kill switch for our facebook functionality. Something we'll keep in mind the next time we're integrating with third party services.