All day today popular social networking website Facebook has been up and down sporadically. No one has really been able to give a legitimate reason why users have been having problems accessing the site. Many users reported DNS failure errors, others got “Service Unavailable” notices, while some just have had nothing load at all.

Now comes word that the outage could be because of issues that internet service provider Qwest has been experiencing. Qwest reportedly has had two incidents occur today. The first was this morning when there was equipment failure in Tukwila, Washington. However this outage was only in the Seattle, Washington area. The other outage occurred when a contractor in the state of Indiana cut through some of the national backbone fiber that Qwest operates. This caused the company to route traffic differently for the entire network, so that the cut fiber would not interfere with transfers. This caused some major delays in traffic. Facebook, according to CNET uses Qwest to get some of their bandwidth, so this may be one of the reasons we have seen so much downtime with the social network today.

Other major websites have experienced issues today as well. Reports are in that Walmart’s credit card processors were down for part of the day. Whether these events are all related has yet to be confirmed. Perhaps we will hear some updates tomorrow morning.