Facebook Breaks Major Websites With Redirection Bug

johnsnails writes "Some of the biggest news sites in the world disappeared yesterday when Facebook took over the internet with a redirection bug. Visitors to sites such as The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, the Gawker network, NBC News and News.com.au were immediately transferred to a Facebook error page upon loading their intended site. It was fixed quickly, and Facebook provided this statement: 'For a short period of time, there was a bug that redirected people logging in with Facebook from third party sites to Facebook.com. The issue was quickly resolved, and Login with Facebook is now working as usual.'"

Re:Um... How?

[Culture20]

These sites are including javascript from facebook. Check your noscript/requestpolicy lists on those pages and you'll be surprised how many external sites those pages include javascript and images from. This was bound to happen (and worse things have probably happened in secret).

Story Subject Fail

[OzPeter]

Facebook did not "Break major websites". Instead Facebook users who were logged in to Facebook (and hence working under the auspices of Facebook) were screwed over when they went to third party sites. Sheesh .. even TFS explains that.

Are we now starting to refer to the Internet as teh Facebook???

Re:Details: Logging in from 3rd party sites?

[SJHillman]

The third-party sites load a chunk of Facebook onto their site, so if you're logged into Facebook then you're logged into that chunk on the third-party site. The third-party site doesn't have your login or information - it's passed between you and the chunk of Facebook on that site. Or at least, that's how it's supposed to work.

It's not the 90's anymore... you can load a page that's connected to dozens of different services that are almost completely independent of each other and the page you're on.

Re:Single point of failure

[SJHillman]

I use Facebook, I admit it. However, I only use Facebook for Facebook. If I log in to another site, I don't use the "Connect with Facebook" option to log in. If the site only allows you to log in with Facebook, I leave. I've yet to find a mission critical site like banks, etc that use Facebook or another service. Therefore, I'm doing my part to save humanity from the single point of failure.