Tens of thousands of people were deprived access to their Facebook accounts for the past days, some even more than a week! By now, forunately, most accounts are available again and have returned unharmed (save for a crop in FarmVille here, and a bankrupt restaurant in Restaurant City there). Photos, wall posts, and other Facebook data should all still be there, but as a downside, Facebook had to reset privacy settings to their most restrictive settings for the recent updates of those affected.

This was the message presented to victims of the “Extended Site Maintenance”:

Our apologies for the extended site maintenance

You may not have been able to access your account over the last several days. We’re sorry for the inconvenience; an extended technical issue affected a small number of Facebook accounts, including yours. We have done our best to restore you account to its most recent state, but some data and settings may not be current. In order to be cautious, we defaulted some of your privacy settings to their most restrictive settings. You may wish to review your privacy settings and reset them. In addition, some of your content may not be up to date. This includes:

Photos or content you may have recently added or deleted. Friends you may have recently added or removed. Other content you’ve added, sent, received, or posted.

All of Facebook’s features are working, and you will be able to communicate and share information with your friends just like before. We recommend double checking your settings, applications friends list, ect. to make sure everything is in order. We appreciate you support of Facebook and are taking steps to ensure these sorts of problems do not happen again.

If you encounter any problems with you account over the next few days, let us know here.

We’re curious if any of our readers fell victim to the lengthy outage. If so, how many days were you disconnected? How many times did you try to refresh in vain? Perhaps you already accepted the death of your Facebook account? Let those emotions out…

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