Feathers: An apology and explanation for last weeks' Facebook® outage.

Last week, Feathers experienced an unexpected loss of service from Facebook® which meant that Feathers Visage (previously Feathers for Facebook®) could not post updates to Facebook®. This has now been fixed and you can once again post to your Facebook® profiles using Feathers. I would like to explain to you what happened and why.

On May 5th, without notice, and when I was busy preparing for a conference I presented at in Belgium this past Monday, Facebook® restricted Feathers's access rights, stopping it from posting status updates and thereby crippling the application. Unfortunately, this coincided with Feathers being featured on the German and Austrian app stores last week. This meant that a large group of people bought Feathers only to find that they could not update their Facebook® status with it.

I realized the extent of the issue only after returning from Belgium and immediately got in touch with Facebook® to find out why they had restricted the application and what I needed to do to get them to unlock our access. They replied to me on the evening of May 13th that it was because they considered the title of the app a trademark infringement (because it contained "for Facebook®") and because the icon contained the Facebook® "f".

On May 14th, I rebranded the app to Feathers™ Visage, set up a new web site for it, removed the Facebook® "f" from the icon, and submitted updates to the app store with the name and icon changes as well as several bug fixes for iPad compatibility.

On May 15th, I received word from Facebook® that they had removed the restriction on Feathers™ Visage.

All in all, this meant that some of you were unable to post to your Facebook® profiles using Feathers for a little over a week. I apologize profusely for not realizing the extent of the issue sooner and I wish Facebook® had contacted me before crippling my app.

As of May 15th, Feathers™ Visage should be working properly again. I hope you enjoy using Feathers and please accept my heartfelt apologies for the outage.

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