Facebook Shuts Down for 30 Minutes to Rollback Feature Leak

Facebook inadvertently gave the world a peek at some of the projects it's working on as some prototype features were pushed to users before they were ready for the prime time. In fact, the site had to be shut down for a period of time to bring everything back to normal and revert the changes.

"Facebook is available again after being down for a brief period. We apologize for the inconvenience," Facebook tweeted. "Also, some internal prototypes were exposed to people and resulted in us disabling the site briefly. It's now back to normal," it added.

Facebook did not offer too many details about the nature of the problem and would not say what prototypes were leaked or why the site had to be shut down.

For about 30 minutes the site as well as any connected service, including the Like buttons across the web were unavailable. While this may seem like a very drastic move, because of the way Facebook infrastructure works it was probably the only fast solution.

Any change pushed by Facebook is propagated to its many servers and data centers. However, the push is not instantaneous and works more like a domino effect.

Facebook relies on BitTorrent to get updates to its thousands of machines and, while this makes the process fast and light on resources, it also means losing some control over it.

Regardless, the leak had a good side-effect, it revealed some of the changes Facebook is working on. One is a revamped fan page layout. The navigational tabs will be gone making way for a cleaner interface, similar to the new Facebook profile pages.

Facebook is apparently taking the Friendship Pages to their next step with work on a feature dubbed Memories. It enables you to browse your past actions on Facebook if you feel like taking a trip down memory lane.

Of course, by the time these and other features and changes that were leaked do get finalized they may alter quite a bit, but at least the Fan Page revamp and the Memories feature seem like a sure bet.