Facebook down (and back up) hours before major announcement

Facebook was down, and then Facebook was back up again, hours before Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivered a major announcement on the future of the popular social network.

According to several blogs – including the Huffington Post, which kept a pretty regular running count of site outages – Facebook started spluttering at around midnight last night. At 1:15 this morning, the site reportedly temporarily came back to life, before crashing again for users in several parts of the country. By 6 a.m., the site was still "shaky," the Huffington Post, reported, with downrightnow.com showing "possible service trouble" at Facebook.

The problems have stubbornly persisted for many users. "I can log in, but not able to do much except status update, and comment," one of our readers wrote. "NONE of the apps are working!"

Meanwhile, thousands of disgruntled Facebook users took to Twitter to complain about Facebook, and "Facebook down" remains a relatively popular topic over on the micro-blogging platform. This Horizons blogger had no trouble signing on to Facebook early this afternoon. The News Feed appeared to churn along at a zippy pace, and the chat functionality worked fine.

Facebook, for its part, has not issued a comment on the outages.

The service problems today follow closely on the heels of two recent outages. As we reported last month, the popular social network crashed twice in September, raising much alarm among regular Facebook fans. "We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible," Facebook reps wrote at the time, before blaming the outages on service-related issues.