Problems at Facebook?

I was thinking about the whole recession thing and how it impacts Microsoft. As I worked through my train of thought, I remembered the huge 899 million Euro fine that the EU slapped Microsoft with in Feb 2008. I remember thinking then that the EU was almost treating Microsoft like an ATM (probably inspired by this post).

I wondered why in this time of recession the EU hasn't yet again tapped its ATM and thought I'd update my Facebook status to say "Viraj wonders why, with this recession n all, the EU hasn't tapped its ATM (Microsoft) again using the same anti-trust excuse...". To my surprise, I got a little popup that said "Validation Error - A validation error occured" and nothing more informative.

Interesting. What exactly is Facebook validating, and did I have some red-herring text in there? I would expect filters for expletives, racial slurs, geo-political issues... but my status message didn't seem to violate any of those. I tried the following variants, which all failed:

"Viraj wonders why, with this recession n all, the EU hasn't tapped its ATM (MSFT) again using the same anti-trust excuse..."

"Viraj wonders why, with this recession n all, the EU hasn't tapped its ATM again using the same anti-trust excuse..."

"Viraj wonders why, with this recession n all, the EU hasn't tapped its ATM again..."

"Viraj wonders why, with this recession n all, the EU"

"wonders..."

Ok, so it's certainly not the text of my status message that's causing this. I started poking around, and my 'Home' page seemed OK - I had news items, status updates from friends, etc. However, when I jumped to my own profile, I was suprised to find that all data I had published was blank. No wall posts, no posted items, no recent history. However, my photo albums seemed to fine, as did my profile information.

My guess is there's been some kind of data loss-ish issue at FB (a lot of their data is simply held in caches so maybe a cache and replicas blew away - perhaps Wall posts are not persisted?). Anyways, I'll try to update status again and see if stuff comes back... meanwhile, I'm locked out of changing my Facebook status...

Any guesses about what might be going on?

Update: I can't seem to be able to clear my previous status message either... the status is cleared in the webpage (local javascript clearing it, I would assume) but on refresh I see my old status again...

Update2: And we're back... that didn't last too long. Cool!