Facebook (News - Alert) is working as usual now, but earlier today, October 21^st, the highly trafficked social site experienced major issues with some users’ status updates, wall postings and payments.

Facebook’s developer page confirmed the issues. The page noted that that the site had gone offline at around 4:46 a.m. The page also showed a huge spike in user errors beginning around 5:00 a.m. this morning.

Ultimately, Facebook was able to get status updates and wall postings up and running again, while payments still remained offline. Users, meanwhile, took to competitor site Twitter (News - Alert) to vent their complaints about the social networks technical issues.

Even after many of the issues with pages and profiles were fixed, many users continued to complain that they could not add anything new to the site.


Image via ZGeek.com

A spokesperson for Facebook told Engaget that things are now 100 percent back to normal, explaining that the issues were a result of problems encountered during maintenance.

"Earlier this morning, while performing some network maintenance, we experienced an issue that prevented some users from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time,” the spokesperson said. “We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100%. We're sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused."

It wasn’t only Facebook that suffered due to these technical issues; at least 3,587 other domains were directly affected. In the end, the numbers are most likely to be much higher. Many businesses and websites are integrated with or rely in-part on Facebook’s services to run their own.

These technical issues could have an adverse affect on Facebook’s stock price. On Thursday its stock closed at $52.21 – the highest it has ever been.

Michael Allen, from Compuware (News - Alert), explained, 'This outage will have an enormous impact on millions; potentially even billions of people."