Facebook glitch takes down major sites before being fixed

A Facebook bug had been floating around the internet all of this morning causing much annoyance to people trying to log on to the site via other websites. The issue said to be with Facebook Connect was dragging users from websites that allow signing-in with Facebook only to show up an error message that doesn’t go away.

Trying to log in from sites like Hulu, Huffington Post and even NBC and CNN took you to a Facebook page that says, ‘An error occurred. Please try again later.’ It has a blue ‘Okay’ at the end of the error, but it has been reported that clicking on it only takes you to yet another blank page.

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Trying to hit the back button was in vain too as it showed you the page you intended to be on for a bit before the error kicked in again. The only way to rid yourself of this error is by logging out of Facebook.

The buggy error message

This issue has been affecting millions worldwide as Facebook took people hostage from other websites only to show them an error for no clear reason at all.

It is possible that this frustrating error is costing Facebook a lot of money in ad revenue, as pages don’t seem to appear. Shortly after this error was spotted Facebook released a statement saying that it had been fixed.

“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,” Facebook said in a statement to The Next Web.

Facebook did not mention what steps it had taken to ensure that this frustrating error did not repeat itself. Facebook Connect is the social networking website’s prized feature that allows users to log in to countless websites through it. It cuts down on the necessity of time consuming registration processes, as well as helps you put data from third party websites on to your Facebook Timeline.

Surely before this entire crash it was difficult to gauge the widespread usage of the Facebook Connect tool around the Internet.

Facebook has been having a frustrating week with its privacy and security. Facebook almost grudgingly has allowed ads that have been targeted to users post tracking their online behaviour to be marked as so. Post the FTC crackdown, Facebook is now showing a little blue icon called AdChoice that allows the user to know that the ad has been targeted towards them specifically.

The ad unfortunately will not voluntarily show users this information. You will need to rollover your mouse over the grey ‘X’ situated in the top right corner of the ad to notice the icon. You can then change the settings that get Facebook to stop displaying targeted ads to you.

This move has been made by Facebook because the social networking giant wants to make users more aware of the kind of ads being displayed to them, allowing them to opt out if it makes them uncomfortable.

(Cover Image Credit: Getty Images)