Facebook Connect feature crashes, affects many third-party sites

Facebook's Log In or Connect feature which is used by many sites, was down with a bug today which caused the feature to crash and many users who attempted to use it got an error message.

The Log in or Connect feature tends to pop up when one visits news websites, such as Huffington Post The Daily Dot, etc where the sites asks users to log in via their Facebook account.

According to The Next Web, 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."

Facebook later issued a statement saying, "For a short period of time, there was a bug that redirected people logging in with Facebook from third party sites to Facebook.com. The issue was quickly resolved, and Login with Facebook is now working as usual."

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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.

The headline on Mashable seems to say it all. How Facebook briefly killed the Internet. The post states that while the bug only lasted less than 10 minutes, but it has highlighted just how many important websites use Facebook Connect for user authentication.

Mashable also points out: What's interesting is that a user didn't even need to be performing the action for the error - and hijacking - to occur. Instead, simply being logged into both places (and having the accounts linked) was enough to force users off of a third-party website and onto Facebook's error page.