How Facebook Connect glitch took down prominent websites? 

Let’s take a moment and digest this… Visitors to some of the major news websites such as MSNBC.com, CNN, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, News.com.au, the Gawker network (including Gizmodo), Yelp and New York Magazine were instantly transferred to a Facebook error page upon loading the intended site.

Internet users, who were logged into their Facebook accounts with Facebook Connect, the single sign-on tool Facebook uses to allow its accounts to serve as logins to other online services, when attempted to visit some of the Web’s biggest sites —- redirected away from their intended destination to an error message on Facebook.

According to Alex Wilhelm, the bug was “dragging people from around the Internet, from news sites, to Hulu, even from Facebook’s own status page, to a page that simply states “An error occurred. Please try again later.”

“For a short period of time, there was a bug that redirected people from third party sites integrated with Facebook to Facebook.com. The issue was quickly resolved,” the social networking website Facebook said.

It appears to suggest that the error lies in Facebook Connect, so what is Facebook Connect ?

Facebook Connect is a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) from Facebook that allow members to log onto third-party websites and apps using Facebook accounts, and share information with their friends on the social network.

But as The Next Web rightly points out, Facebook did not apologise for taking away millions of pageviews from its partners. Also, it did not say how it intends to never have this happen again.

Facebook Error Redirect Video

About the author: Amy Canter

Amy is a journalist and digital strategist with more than a decade of experience with the designing, editing and writing websites for both broadcast and print media. Previously, Amy worked for major companies in Silicon Valley, including Sony Electronics, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, and Intel working in various marketing, social media, and community management roles.