Nick Bartlett

For a site that currently has an Alexa traffic ranking of 5, this is pretty dumb.  It’s almost as bad as the sporadic errors on myspace.  Site maintenance?  Really?  At 10:45am on a Tuesday?  Come’on.. give me a break.  Facebook is one of the busiest sites on the net and you disable my account for “a few hours” in the middle of the day?  I’d expect they would be able to release code with a “flip of the switch”.  If not, I’d expect downtime to be scheduled and during times of minimal traffic.

I started getting this error for a few days ago now.  I simply send a hyperlink to a friend and facebook doesn’t like that.  WTF?

12/31/08 Update:

I found a post on Facebook about the issue at http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=18347337130 .  Apparently, “if you try to send a message that contains a link to a website with an importer” you’ll get that message.  “This response is our way of trying to protect every one’s privacy. Right now, the sites that are asking for this information, and that we are blocking as a result, gain complete access and control over your account”.  Okay, but I entered a few different URLs over a time span of a few days and every one of them was blocked.  I’m pretty certain it’s a bug.