Is Your Site's Facebook 'Like' Button Broken?

Just weeks after Facebook unveiled its flagship Open Graph social plugin, the "Like" button, a major bug began affecting a vast number of sites that had integrated the "Like" button, including high-traffic sites like CNN.com.

The bug affected "Like" buttons that had not already been liked by any user yet.

Users who attempted to click the button received an error message: "WEBSITE INACCESSIBLE: The page at [page URL] could not be reached."

But, of course, when the developers checked the page URL, they saw that the page was accessible.

A bug report was filed with Facebook, and it was quickly voted up and assigned the highest priority: P1 Blocker. The P1 is a measure of priority on a scale from P1 to P5, with P1 being the highest priority. And Blocker means that the effect of the bug is rendering a live site feature broken or unavailable.

Later the next day, as developers continued to report problems, Mike from Facebook's platform engineering team reported on their progress:

"We've been having trouble with outbound connectivity from the tier of machines that power the Like button. We're still debugging this issue, but we've restarted the tier of machines a few times, and the situation does seem to be improving.

"We have a number of people from our engineering and operations team continuing to work on the issue and hope to have a more definitive update shortly.

"Sorry for the inconvenience here, and thanks for bearing with us."

Some users have reported (via the bug reporting system) that the problem seems to have resolved itself on their site.

However, as of about 10 p.m. Eastern on June 1, the problem had not officially been designated as resolved.