I’m not sure what hole I was under this week, but I just got wind of this last night. Apparently, over this past weekend, the popular social networking site Facebook had some, um, technical difficulties. Some users that logged in to check their profiles were greeted with the PHP source code of “profile.php” instead of the client-side rendering.

This might not seem like a big deal. But this isn’t HTML source code, which is the code you’d see if you did a “View Source” in your browser. This is the server-side source — the site’s “engine”. For a site with such a high magnitude, I think it would be enough to make their web developers soil their pants. And I think they did. Naturally, tech blogs all over the web were reporting on Facebook’s little glitch. Some even got a hold of the code and posted snippets, which of course prompted swift cease & desist messages from the FB camp. Even Digg deleted a couple stories.

Finding out all this several days after the fact, I couldn’t find a blog that still had a piece of the code up. But that’s what Google’s Cache is for. I found a cached page that had a small snippet, and I was a bit disappointed. Mostly “includes”, commands that include the contents of other files.

Facebook, you’ve released an API, you’ve leaked a bit of code, and now it’s time to go all out — open source!