The so-called Facebook panic occurs when the social networking site goes down, for any appreciable length of time. The Web then becomes flooded with searches like "what's wrong with Facebook," "is Facebook down," "Facebook not working," and so forth. The same sort of panic occurs when Twitter goes down.
In Facebook's case, since many use Facebook Connect to login to other sites, it's a bigger problem that just not being able to access Facebook.
The problem, it appears is that Facebook rolled out some prototype features a bit too soon. The company admitted as such in a Tweet which said:
Also, some internal prototypes were exposed to people and resulted in us disabling the site briefly. It's now back to normal.
The updates that rolled out, and then back, were:
- An update to Facebook Pages, which made them look a lot like Facebook Place pages and the new user profiles.
- Memories, which disappeared so fast it's still unknown what the feature is. It sounds, however, like some way of storing photos in perpetuity.
- A new option for News Feed named "Outside World," which also disappeared too quickly to determine what it actually means.
- New Fan Pages, that were redesigned and also allowed a Page admin to switch accounts, without having to logout and login again.
It's unclear how far along these new features were, and when the company will release them to the wild.
