How many submissions do we need on this topic? Maybe I'm jaded because I don't really "get" the whole social network phenomena, but honestly, who really cares anyway? Productivity will (briefly) go up; a few people dependant on FB SSO's wont be able to log into some other pointless services and the internet will continue to function. I normally down vote people when they say "what does xyz have to do with HN?", but 3…
For many people, Facebook is how they interact with the web. It's their primary portal for talking with their friends, sharing photos, sending messages, and catching up on news stories.
Calling it a "social network" is like calling Google only a search engine. It's way, way more. And this outage is completely unprecedented. Can you recall a previous time that Facebook has been down? I can't.