Is your Facebook News Feed broken too?
Update: These issues are now fixed and the News Feed appears to be fully functional again.
My friend and I are both trying to get some work done tonight and unsurprisingly that consists of some procrastination on Facebook. While browsing his News Feed, my friend noticed that the More button at the bottom has disappeared and he can no longer see anything beyond the first few initial stories. I checked my News Feed and indeed I'm seeing the same thing: I can't scroll past my first seven stories.
After my friend pointed this out to me, I quickly started looking for other issues on the page. Another problem I've noticed is with the recently launched Ticker box. Clicking on any story on the Ticker no longer seems to work. It doesn't open up details like it did before. The Ticker still updates, and I can choose to Show Older stories, but I can't actually click on any of them. For my friend, the Ticker won't even load.
Thirdly, the bar in the bottom-right isn't showing up either: the Translations button and the Chat button are no longer present. Interestingly, they do both load on other Facebook webpages (my friend confirmed the same). Only the News Feed webpage isn't working.
Last but not least, the Update box does not show previews anymore. If you paste a link into it, as I have in the screenshot above, the preview won't load. If you do the same for the Update box on your profile, the preview loads fine. This further confirms that just the News Feed webpage is broken.
I'm using Google Chrome, but I checked Internet Explorer and these issues all occur there as well. My friend is also using Google Chrome but he the same problems happen for him in Mozilla Firefox too. I think it's safe to rule out a browser-specific problem.
My first guess is this has something to with the JavaScript code on the Facebook News Feed webpage. The most recent update to the News Feed, the addition of a sort menu, was announced just last week. It's possible that this is the culprit, but it could also be something else entirely.
I have contacted Facebook and will update this post if I hear back, although it's pretty late in the day now. In the meantime, are you experiencing issues on your Facebook News Feed?
See also:
- Facebook adds Recent Stories First option to News Feed
- Facebook rolls out revamped News Feed with Ticker
- Facebook allowing ads into the Ticker, its second News Feed
- Facebook rolls out the Ticker to more users
- Facebook moves privacy controls inline, simplifies sharing
- Facebook offers new privacy policy for regular people