Facebook database outage cut off about 150,000 : Via The Social - CNET News.

Thousands of Facebook users who have been unable to access their accounts for nearly a week and a half now are now seeing their profiles restored--but some data related to recent profile updates may have been lost.

What happened? According to Facebook, the replacement of profiles and login screens with a "down for maintenance" notice--which appears to have started on October 3--stemmed from "a technical issue with a single database." The company has stressed that there is no chance that it was due to hackers or other malicious activity.

Profiles should be restored over the course of the next day, the company estimates.

"Our engineering team has worked around the clock, and as of today, all of these users should begin to regain access to their Facebook accounts," Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker said reading from a statement. "We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused and we are taking additional measures to uphold the reliability users come to expect from Facebook."

Less than 0.05 percent of Facebook's users have been affected by the outage, the company estimated. The social network's last head count, about a month ago, was 300 million active users, so that comes out to be a total of about 150,000 affected users. Not very many but enough to put some of them in a panic over not being able to access a primary mode of communication and (in some cases) business.

Profiles have not been lost or deleted, Facebook has continually said--even though the company has been otherwise tight-lipped about the maintenance issue until this point. When affected users' access is restored, however, some things may be different and very recent updates may be missing. According to a notice that Facebook is displaying to members who may have been affected:

Read Original Article:(Via The Social - CNET News.)