My Facebook account was “temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance” today.
Seems like I’m far from the first person this happened to. It’s common enough to make it into Facebook’s FAQ.
So – no big deal, right? just had to wait a while with uploading photos from today’s trip with the kids, a little annoyance, nothing more. Then I wanted to check in the meantime what’s up on another site. Guess what I used as a login there? yep, Facebook connect. No login for you!
Facebook may be getting away with it for now, as it seems like these “maintenance” downtimes didn’t create negative buzz for Facebook connect’s position as the identity of choice for many avid FB users. But watch as more of these incidents start raising awareness to the implication of relying on Facebook as an identity provider. We’ll then realize it’s another point of failure on our way to our favorite sites, and one with no simple workaround.
Truth be told, this is not a Facebook issue, it’s an issue for centralized identity providers. If WordPress.com were down, my OpenID identity would be down just the same. With unified identity comes a unified point of failure…