Facebook Temporarily Hijacks the Cyber World

Facebook is the world’s most popular social networking site. Over the years it has expanded even more and today it ranks among the most visited websites in the world. With billions of registered users something is bound to go wrong at any time. In a recent event, Facebook temporally hijacked the cyber world. This took place Thursday afternoon and lasted for about an hour.

Websites that use Facebook integrations were dragged from their landing pages to the Facebook error web page. If you were logged into Facebook and tried accessing other websites at the same time you were taken to a Facebook error page. Fox News, Gawker, Washington Post, Yahoo! and Slickdeals were among the numerous websites affected by the mysterious bug. However, those who weren’t logged into Facebook did not receive this error.

This was a huge surprise to all users as they couldn’t access other websites but were instead taken to a Facebook error page. According to reports the problem was with the Facebook’s Connect service, which governs “likes,” “comments” and other Web-based features. Facebook declined to reveal the elements of the error, but gave a statement to NBC news regarding the situation. They said, “For a short period of time, there was a bug that redirected people from third party sites with Facebook Login to Facebook.com. The issue was quickly resolved.”

Users were not pleased and vented out their frustration on Twitter and other online messaging forums. They said that it was disturbing that Facebook could hijack the Internet even if it was unintentional. Some people said that it was good that the error was resolved instantly or else the affected sites would have intervened themselves by disabling the widgets. Although the problem was fixed immediately, you can still expect a proper apology from Facebook in the future once they figure out what went wrong.

[Image via lh5.ggpht]