And when Facebook has problems, everyone takes to other socials networks to complain (and make sure it’s not just them).

The “Down for everyone or just me” site says that Facebook is up and running, but there’s no doubt that it’s been a pain for many users this morning.

Are you experiencing any issues? Let us know in the comments.

In fact, some people have been tweeting about Facebook downtime today, less than 24 hours since the filing was made public (hat tip: NY Daily news).

It’s a good thing there’s a Twitter. It never goes down.

Originally plagued by registration and login issues, the problems have spread to actual functionality of the service. The huge demand by players to track stats, make matches, and organize clans has crashed servers. The service is currently still given “intermittent” status on the official Elite status site, which acknowledged the problems late last week. After blaming high traffic on the failures, they announced that they would throttle access while they worked on the problems –

We are also going to temporarily limit access to Elite services on both the console applications and website while we build additional capacity and scale. We’ll look to increase access to greater numbers of users as soon as possible

In order to assuage frustrated gamers, Elite offered a free month of premium service to existing premium users and extended the Founder eligibility period (where new MW3 players can sign up) until the end of November.

Here’s the latest from the Elite status page:

As we continue to keep everyone updated on the steps we’re taking here to get more of you into Call of Duty Elite, we are aware that some users have been denied entry into the service once they have input their age. We recognize that in regions around the world player age requirements vary. We are happy to say that we have identified some solutions to this issue. Our team is working on the technical changes required, and we expect to announce the details soon on this change. Meanwhile, if you purchased MW3 and were not able to register for Call of Duty ELITE, we wanted to make you aware of this pending change, and we thank you for your patience.

We remain committed to taking all of the necessary steps to increase our capacity for all our users. The Call of Duty Elite team will keep you updated at callofduty.com/elitestatus. Continue to check back here for overall Elite status or for a complete list of FAQs, check out our customer service site. We will also give you updates regularly through the official Twitter account, @CallofDutyElite.

We’re working around the clock 24/7 to resolve things, so thanks again for your patience.

That Twitter account looks like it’s been hit with a load of questions, and it looks like it’s doing its best to answer them. From the wide variety of complaints, we can see that the Elite outage is affecting multiple parts of the service.

Twitter user xMimisReal looks to be having the same problem that this writer is having:

Paddy1322 looks to be having the age verification issue that they mentioned in the above statement:

Some seem to still be having problems even logging in:

Clan making features are currently down as well right now, according to Elite –

Call of Duty Elite’s response to all of these queries basically take this form:

According to feedback we received on a previous WebProNews article on the topic, the problems are prevalent and varied. And many users are beginning to lose patience. Will Elite have to offer more than what they’ve already offered in order to assuage frustrated players? Let us know what you think.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE: Modern Warfare 3 has been out for a few days now, and it looks like, for the most part – so far so good. It’s received nearly unanimous acclaim from critics and has broken all kinds of sales records by taking in $400 million on launch day. So apart from Battlefield players spamming review sites with negative reviews, it looks like Modern Warfare 3 is going to be one in a long line of commercial successes for the Call of Duty franchise.

The only problem is with the Modern Warfare 3 companion service, Call of Duty Elite. The service, which is basically a social network for COD gamers, allows players to track stats, share recorded match videos, and find players with their interests and skill level for matchmaking.

But if you’ve tried to access the service over the past few days, you know that it’s not really working. And the users that are able to register their accounts are finding that there are some serious flaws with the stat tracking and other services.

Personally, I’ve been unable to connect at all. The one time that I was able to register my account and link my gamertag, I was instructed to log back in and Elite said that my username did not exist. Since that time, I’ve been unable to sign in at all.

Apparently I’m not alone in having issues, and the Elite team posted an explanation to the Elite status page:

At launch, our registration and login systems were crushed by gamers trying to enter the Elite site at the same time. We have now fixed the registration and login systems, but we have found that the greater than expected demand is crashing servers. We’re immediately deploying multiple additional servers to beef up the system. We are also going to temporarily limit access to Elite services on both the console applications and website while we build additional capacity and scale. We’ll look to increase access to greater numbers of users as soon as possible.

They also promise premium subscribers an additional month of the service free of charge, and they will extend the “founder eligibility” where new members can sign up for premium by one month.

As of right now, the service indicator reports intermittent service.

Have you been having problems with Call of Duty Elite? Let us know in the comments.

Here’s the full statement:

Since Tuesday’s launch, Modern Warfare 3’s multiplayer has been working great. In fact, the amount of players online is even higher than what it was this time last year for Black Ops. Have fun — we hope you continue to enjoy MW3 to the fullest.

However, on Call of Duty Elite, we are having trouble scaling the service to meet demand. Many of you are trying to get in and unfortunately, you can’t right now. You’re frustrated, we know it, and we know we need to fix it. Our teams have been working non-stop to identify issues and resolve them as quickly as possible. Again, these issues have no impact on the performance of the game.

We want to share with you what we know at this time and what we are doing:

At launch, our registration and login systems were crushed by gamers trying to enter the Elite site at the same time. We have now fixed the registration and login systems, but we have found that the greater than expected demand is crashing servers. We’re immediately deploying multiple additional servers to beef up the system. We are also going to temporarily limit access to Elite services on both the console applications and website while we build additional capacity and scale. We’ll look to increase access to greater numbers of users as soon as possible.

As more users log into the Elite system, you may find that the wait to get into Elite is longer than you expect. We know how frustrating that is and we appreciate your patience. Many of you are now able to see your player card and stats, but if you don’t see all your recent matches or career summary, don’t worry — your gameplay data for your entire careers in both Black Ops and MW3 is safely stored, and it will all be available to you once these issues are resolved.

And for our premium members who are Founders, know that granting your status and delivering your in-game benefits in MW3 is a priority. Also, to ensure that every premium member receives their full money’s worth, we are immediately and automatically extending your membership to Call of Duty Elite by 30 days at no additional cost. If you’re still considering becoming a premium member, we’re going to extend Founder eligibility until the end of the month, and you will also receive the additional 30 days of access.

Those of you that felt that the free apps weren’t enough to assuage some BlackBerry users have been proven correct, as a suit filed in Quebec is seeking class action status on behalf of “all residents in Canada who have a BlackBerry smartphone and who pay for a monthly data plan” but because of the outage, were unable to access their messages and emails.

As a quick refresher, the BlackBerry outage began around October 10th, when reports emerged from parts of Europe, Africa and The Middle East that folks were having trouble with some of their services. In a couple of days, that outage had spread to North America. BBM, email, and web browsing were the three things most affected by the outage.

As services were slowly being restored, co-CEO of RIM Mike Lazaridis took to YouTube and issued a video apology to BlackBerry customers. He said that they had failed on their goal to provide reliable communications and that they had let many people down.

Shortly after that, RIM announced that they would be giving BlackBerry customers free apps in compensation for the outage. The free apps list included things like SIMS 3, Bejewled, and Speech Translator Pro. All in all, over $100 worth of apps have been offered for free.

Many were skeptical that this display would be enough to satisfy disgruntled users – that some would want real monetary compensation for the multiple days that they were unable to use the BlackBerry network. This is exactly what this lawsuit is asking for.

The Respondent has failed to take action to either directly compensate BlackBerry users or to indirectly compensate BlackBerry users by arranging for wireless service providers to refunds their customers and to take full responsibility for these damages

When you think about it, compensation for 4 days of data services being down doesn’t really amount to much money. I guess for some people, it’s the principle of the thing.

Time will tell if more suits like this are filed in other countries. Were you affected by the Blackberry outage? Do you feel like RIM did enough with the free apps and apologies? Let us know in the comments.

Most saw some sort of outage in web browsing, email or BlackBerry messenger.

On Monday, users in Europe, Africa and The Middle East began experiencing issues – and by early Wednesday the problems had spread to the Americas. American BlackBerry users began reporting outages during the wee hours on Twitter and Facebook.

Services were slowly restored in the following days, and RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis issued a YouTube apology to BlackBerry users, saying that “we let many of you down.”

Now, those affected BlackBerry users learn what RIM plans to give them for their troubles: Free apps.

A selection of premium apps will become free on the BlackBerry App World in the upcoming weeks, and they will remain free for the rest of 2011. Here’s the current list of apps that will be free to all users:

• SIMS 3 – Electronic Arts
• Bejeweled – Electronic Arts
• N.O.V.A. – Gameloft
• Texas Hold’em Poker 2 – Gameloft
• Bubble Bash 2 – Gameloft
• Photo Editor Ultimate – Ice Cold Apps
• DriveSafe.ly Pro – iSpeech.org
• Speech Translator Pro – iSpeech.org
• Drive Safe.ly Enterprise – iSpeech.org
• Nobex Radio™ Premium – Nobex
• Shazam Encore – Shazam
• Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant – Vlingo

According to RIM, there are more apps to come. When it’s all said and done, there will be over $100 worth of free apps available to users.

RIM’s enterprise customers will also be receiving on month of free enhanced tech support.

“We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience,” said Lazaridis. “We have apologized to our customers and we will work tirelessly to restore their confidence. We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to help prevent something like this from happening again.”

Will a handful of free apps be enough to fix the damage that has been caused by the outage? There’s no doubt that some users will be disappointed, and would prefer some sort of monetary reimbursement.

The backlash on social media channels has been pretty severe. Plus, it was a bad week for BlackBerry to crap out – with Apple releasing iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S.

Are you a BlackBerry user? Is this apology package enough to make up for the trouble last week’s outage caused? Let us know in the comments.

BlackBerry users all around the world have had problems browsing the web and using BlackBerry Messenger for the past few days. Users also reported issues with their email services, and yesterday it was revealed that a huge backlog was responsible for the intermittent service.

For the U.S., RIM says that email services are up and running and they are working to clear any remaining jam in order to get it going at full speed. As far as everyone else goes, RIM says that “BlackBerry services are operating well globally.”

On Twitter, some people continue to complain about problems accessing certain functions of their BlackBerry devices, but at least it seems like things are on the mend.

Founder and co-CEO of RIM Mike Lazardis has issued a video apology to BlackBerry customers, posted on the BB YouTube channel.

“Since launching BlackBerry in 1999, it’s been my goal to provide reliable, real-time communications around the world. We did not deliver on that goal this week – not even close. I apologize for the service outages this week – we’ve let many of you down,” he says.

He says they are working hard to “stabilize the system” and that they have seen “steady improvements.”

As you can see, he predicts some “instabilities” as things return to normal.

What do you think about this apology? Is it enough? It sure was a pretty bad time for BlackBerry services to crap out in you’re RIM. While millions of users are taking to the web to vent their frustrations and complain about how their BlackBerrys won’t do anything they need them to do, you have Apple launching iOS 5 and their brand new iPhone 4S Friday morning.

How have you been affected by the BlackBerry outage? Let us know in the comments.

On Monday, European, Middle Eastern and African users began to experience spotty functionality of email, internet browsing and BlackBerry messaging services. It appears that those problems have jumped the pond.

Last night, RIM gave this explanation to users –

The messaging and browsing delays that some of you are still experiencing were caused by a core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure. Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested. As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible. We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused to many of you and we will continue to keep you informed.

And today they acknowledge that BlackBerry users in the Americas are now feeling the outage –

BlackBerry subscribers in the Americas may be experiencing intermittent service delays this morning. We are working to resolve the situation as quickly as possible and we apologize to our customers for any inconvenience. We will provide a further update as soon as more information is available.

BlackBerry users are taking to Twitter to express their frustrations, and “Dear BlackBerry” is a trending topic in the States –

RIM is telling users on Twitter that this is their #1 priority –

Is your BlackBerry experiencing issues? Has this outage made you think a little harder about that big iPhone 4S release on Friday? Let us know in the comments.

It looks like the problems that people are having involve accessing the web, BlackBerry messenger and roaming in Europe. Some users are also reporting the inability to access their email. Apparently, all of these users are tied to one data center maintained by Research in Motion, or RIM – the folks behind the Blackberry devices.

Some of the carriers in the areas are blaming RIM for the outage –

RIM didn’t make an official statement on the reported outages for a while, as they finally responded with this –

Blackberry users have taken to Twitter to voice their frustrations –

It appears that services are slowly reappearing for some users –

The majority of tweets rolling in are about the service still being down. Have you been affected? Are you seeing your BBM and other services returning to normal? Let us know in the comments.

The web relies a lot on Facebook, and with its recent announcements that may just turn out to be the case even more than ever. To put it simply, it can make people a little uneasy or downright frustrated when things aren’t working.

Facebook, while not experiencing a total outage by any means, does appear to be having some issues today. A lot of users are complaining about different ones on Twitter.

Here are some recent tweets:

A lot of the complaints, like the last couple above, are about broken images. That’s not good, considering that Facebook dominates online photos.

Some users have even reported not seeing the ticker feature any longer or that they have been seeing the old version of the news feed. That’s actually been going on since yesterday. We reached out to Facebook this morning for comment, but have yet to hear back.