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Bad Time For Facebook Meltdown (But Is There A Good One?)

Unfortunately for Facebook, the top social net picked a slow news day to suffer its "worst outage" in over four years.

In what The New York Times calls "a fairly technical mea culpa," Facebook said the outage lasted 2.5 hours, and was caused by an "unfortunate handling of an error condition."

That gave industry watchers plenty of time to read into the glitch, and even question whether Facebook is ready to rule the Web.

"Facebook has generally had a good track record in terms of keeping its homepage alive, but I've heard repeated complaints about the integrity of its API," writes TechCrunch. "And given Facebook's goal of becoming the social fabric of the web -- which entails maintaining a presence on countless third party sites -- it's imperative that it keeps its various widgets and authentication buttons working properly."

While service outages are commonplace online (Twitter, anyone?), "Facebook may find it has a shorter leash with consumers, who are increasingly spending their time there online," suggests eWeek. "Some of the 500 million-plus Facebook users tweeted about the event on Twitter, wondering what they would do without access to their photos, links, videos and other content they shared on the massive social network."

"We want you to know that we take the performance and reliability of Facebook very seriously," the company wrote in a blog post.

"Well, of course: If the site's down, it can't sell ads, and if it can't sell ads, how is Mark Zuckerberg going to justify his enormous Forbes valuation?" jokes The Guardian.

Notes Inside Facebook: "As part of the downtime, social plugins such as the Like button, and the developer platform, were also not accessible."

Village Voice columnist Jen Doll tried to cheer the masses despondent over the outage with a list of alternative activities. These included: Obsessively refreshing ("There is no such thing as too much refreshing," she notes), tweeting: "OMG FACEBOOK IS DOWN RIGHT NOW!!!" and:

Refresh again. The message changed! Debate what this means. Is Zuckerberg communicating in code?

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