Some Facebook users were still having trouble accessing the social network Friday morning, with the site either not loading or loading slowly.
On Thursday night, when users experienced loading issues for at least two hours, hacking group Anonymous commented via its Twitter account about the slowdown. It wasn't clear from the posts whether the hacktivists had anything to do with the problems or were just celebrating them.
"Looks like good old Facebook is having packet problems" and "Oh yeah ... RIP Facebook a new sound of tango down, b------," were among the tweets posted by @YourAnonNews on Twitter.
But on Friday, Anonymous took a different tone on Twitter:
And, at about 7:30 pm ET Friday, a PR rep for Facebook wanted to make sure msnbc.com also saw this tweet, from what appears to be an Anonymous member in Sweden:
Another Facebook spokesperson would not address the Anonymous posts from Thursday night, only giving msnbc.com the following statement then:
"Earlier today, some users briefly experienced issues loading the site. The issues have since been resolved and everyone should now have access to Facebook. We apologize for any inconvenience."
At approximately 9 a.m. ET Friday morning, the website DownForEveryoneOrJustMe showed that Facebook continued to suffer intermittent outages for some of the social network's nearly 1 billion users. Msnbc.com has again contacted Facebook for an update and will update this story when we hear back.
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said the company is not sure what's behind the problems, "but I would note that in the past Facebook downtime or inaccessibility have not been for malicious reasons.
"My guess is that it's more likely that there were more down-to-earth internal reasons for the downtime rather than an attack," he told msnbc.com.
Some are criticizing Facebook for saying so very little about the problems. Wrote CNET's Dan Farber, in a commentary:
When Facebook goes down or has performance hiccups, as it did Thursday afternoon, many of the 900 million-plus inhabitants of its virtual world feel the pain. So do those who are depending on the social network to ring their cash registers and drive their marketing efforts. It appears that Facebook isn't keen on sharing the details with it constituents regarding what brought the site to its knees yesterday.
Apica, a website load testing and performance monitoring provider, confirmed Facebook's "performance issues, and said Friday that the company checks Facebook’s homepage "every 5 minutes for uptime and 30 minutes for response time from its East Coast Cloud Monitoring locations."
The firm "recorded high response times and sporadic unavailability between the hours of 5:28 p.m. and 7:29 p.m. PST (Thursday), and between midnight and 3 a.m. PST (Friday). The site was unavailable at Apica’s checks at 5:28 p.m., 5:33 p.m., 7:19 p.m., and 7:29 p.m. (all times PST), and again at 6:47 a.m. PST. Apica’s monitoring also shows high spikes in response times — upwards of 30 seconds at some checks and even as high as 74 seconds — during these periods."
Update, Friday PM ET: Apica said performance checks of Facebook.com show that the site has "normalized since this morning. It recorded no additional fatal website attempts since 6:47 a.m. PST."
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