Facebook has been experiencing intermittent disruptions with the service for the better part of 12 hours where users are having trouble posting to their walls, liking, or commenting on other peoples posts. The general pop-up that users are getting says, “An error occurred while trying to write to our database, please try again later.” Eventually likes and comments are going through, but more often than note people are having troubles with normal Facebook activities.
This does not have to do with several changes that Facebook is making to its platform. In response to user complaints over the “chat bar” on the right side of the screen that was rolled out shortly after the Facebook/Skype announcement, Facebook has been tweaking the feature to make it more user friendly. Facebook is also experimenting with a news feed feature within said chat bar that some users are currently seeing. A Facebook spokesperson said the disruptions and the new services “are totally unrelated” and that “we had some general technical issues earlier this morning (unrelated to these Chat changes) but is back to normal now.”