Facebook and its many services were randomly down yesterday. It was a bit odd to see such a massive service get taken out worldwide, but that’s what happened. Facebook and the services it had to offer consumers were down for several hours. Conspiracies started to pop up online about the reason behind the sudden drop in services, and chances are more than a few people were calling their ISP to see if their internet was down. Whether you restarted your gateway, PC, or toggled between online and offline WIFI, there wasn’t any fixing this issue.
Fortunately, the service popped back on and started to return to normal. Although, it was a bit unexpected and problematic for those uncertain if this could happen again. For instance, one gaming service that is attached to Facebook is Oculus. It wasn’t that long ago that Facebook made users on Oculus connect to their Facebook account to play their collection of Oculus games. That might have been a bit annoying for some users, but with this sudden outage, it looked like Oculus gamers could not access their content at all.
That’s a big issue for those that wanted to spend some time in an alternate reality. We’re not sure just how bad the issue was and if this could happen again in the future. Hopefully, it’s not an issue we’ll be dealing with again anytime soon. Having your games locked away behind Facebook for the Oculus VR headset could have prompted a new wake-up call for some gamers. While the Oculus content was not accessible, it does look like other digital storefronts were.
One of the storefronts that offer VR games is Valve’s Steam marketplace. That service, in particular, seemed to run fine. This outage for several hours might have swayed plenty of gamers to start purchasing their VR games through Steam when possible. Regardless, it seems like an issue that no one wants to deal with again. It also goes to show just how many services we regularly use that are attached to Facebook.