Facebook Takes Over the Internet by Redirecting Thousands of Pages

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From 4:30 to 4:42 p.m. on Thursday, Facebook showed the world just how much power it has on the internet.

For less than 15 mnutes, thousands–if not millions–of pages were redirected to a Facebook error page, leaving many internet users confused, frustrated and maybe even a little terrified. A bug in Facebook’s embedded widgets on websites (including CNN, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, the Gawker, The Huffington Post and many many more) rerouted users to the Facebook error page. The thing is, you had to be logged into Facebook at the time to experience the FB blackout. Facebook issued a brief statement of the error:

For a short period of time, there was a bug that redirected people from third party sites with Facebook Login to Facebook.com. The issue was quickly resolved.

Internet users expressed their concern over the error and were even a bit disturbed by it. The error, even though it was unintentional, shows you just how dependent we are on Facebook. Although if you were not logged into Facebook at the time, you wouldn’t have known that anything was wrong, but the fact that millions of people did notice says everything.

If Facebook has the power to disable thousands of websites, just what else can it do?