A multi-hour outage on the popular social networking site Facebook earlier today caused a fault with the site that let some users view other's personal site mail, but was not a hack, according to Facebook management.
Instead, the company explained the problem as relating to errors with third-party proxy servers.
London-based IBM employee Matt Dibb reported on his blog that Facebook had been displaying strange signs shortly before it went down, replacing his login details with an unfamiliar e-mail address, which led him to theorise that the social network may have been hacked. Others including Robert Scoble had similar reports. This is similar to a problem first noted by ZDNet Australia's Munir Kotadia earlier this year.
Once the outage had been resolved, Facebook representatives released a statement that explained the issue:
This morning, we temporarily took down the Facebook site to fix a bug we identified earlier today. This was not the result of a security breach. Specifically, the bug caused some third party proxy servers to cache otherwise inaccessible content. The result was that an isolated group of users could see some pages that were not intended for them. The site has now been restored and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
That would be why, it seems, some Facebook users reported that they had seen what appeared to be other users' data on their Facebook logins. This problem has again brought into focus potential growing pains facing Facebook in light of their fast-growing service, and the chance of any security problems, that the company faces.
ZDNet Australia's Stephen Turner contributed to this report.
