When Joe Hewitt quit the Facebook app development team earlier this month, the company's VP of Communications, Elliot Schrage had said that a "great team of engineers" would be replacing Hewitt.
The question of whether the team has lived up to the expectations of their VP has now risen with a key feature to the functioning of the app having laid broken for more than a day.
The primary cause of the issue was not with the app itself, but with a backend platform API that the app on iPhone and other smartphones use. As a result of this, Facebook users on iPhone were shown blank user profile pages. Explaining the issue, Joe Hewitt who responded to TechCrunch's article on the issue says,
"The FB API has glitches from time to time which break not just the iPhone app, but every app that builds on it, from Blackberry to Seesmic"
Clearly, this is something outside the purview of the app development team. However, the blame is on Facebook in not having identified the issue quick enough. The broken API was detected after close to 24 hours. Also, though broken APIs are a common occurence with web applications, this particular episode has indirectly caused a bit of embarassment to Apple coming pretty close after Joe Hewitt quit Facebook's app development team citing Apple's app approval policies as the reason.
The issue has apparently been fixed now and the app has been working fine at our end. However we would like to hear from our readers if they have been facing any issue still. Please tell us in the comments.
[via TechCrunch]
Easy fix to this that worked for me. I experienced this problem for the past two weeks up until this past Tuesday.
If on wifi. Sign out facebook and sign back in. Click inbox and let the wifi load up until it's done then click your profile again and there everything should be back.
I don't know how the hell they let this error go by unnoticed until now.
yea, this shit was pissing me off and it was broken for me for more than 24 hours… couldnt even update my status…