Facebook Fixed by the Old 'Turn It Off, Turn It Back On' Trick

Yesterday, Facebook went down for few hours, its worst outage since the site's early days. Because Facebook is not Twitter and we're unaccustomed to service disruptions, much ink was spilled over the incident. Given such a big problem, herculean programming fixes must have been required to restore the site, right? Actually, no, the Guardian's Charles Arthur reports:

Ever been on the phone to IT support and they told you to turn it off and then on again, and that sorts it out? Facebook last night had that sort of problem. So they turned the site off and on again. And it fixed their problem. Literally.

As Robert Johnson, its director of software engineering, explained in a slightly shamefaced blogpost, the site was offline for about two-and-a-half hours - its worst outage in four years - due to some technical changes that Facebook had made.

Read the full story at the Guardian.