By - Christina Warren
Category - Lube Stickers
Posted By - http://tinyurl.com/LubeStickers
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| Lube Stickers |
For a few minutes this evening, Facebook was redirecting users visiting dozens of websites — including Mashable — to cryptic error pages.
The reaction online was pretty much what you'd expect, with — as the The Next Web noted — hashtags like "Facebookmageddon" and "Facebocalypse" common amongst Twitter users.
So what happened, exactly? There was an issue with the Facebook
Connect API that caused users on sites that use that API to redirect
users to Facebook error page.
For example, if you were visiting Mashable and logged into
our site using your Facebook account (and you were also signed into
Facebook), you were automatically redirected to a page that looked like
this:
Exiting the page or attempting to re-access the original site would lead to another redirect.
Sites such as The Huffington Post, Kayak, Hulu, The Daily Dot, Pinterest and hundreds of others were all impacted. The bug lasted less than 10 minutes.
In a statement, Facebook told Mashable: "For a short period
of time, there was a bug that redirected people logging in with Facebook
from third party sites. The issue was quickly resolved and Login with
Facebook is now working as usual."
The bug may have been brief, but it has highlighted just how many
important websites use Facebook Connect for user authentication. Over
the span of just a few years, Facebook logins have become so pervasive
that they are nearly second nature. It also shows that if Facebook has
an issue, it can affect more than just its site — it can also impact the
hundreds of thousands (millions?) of sites that integrate with
Facebook's APIs.
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.
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