We initially thought we had a fix, but upon further investigation, we discovered a deeper issue. I agree, we could have been better at updating the bug with this information.
In the meantime, the severity of the issue became more obvious, which is why we accelerated the fix and deployed it today (May 5th) ahead of the regular weekly push scheduled for tomorrow (May 6th).
On April 24th, it was first reported to us that the Realtime API was not sending updates when people comment or post on Pages. As of now, a fix is live and in production.
This was not an easy issue to diagnose the root cause of, and thus to determine how many people, developers and apps were affected. But while it took some time for us to diagnose, as soon as we did, we merged and pushed a fix within a few hours.
At f8, we announced an SLA of 48-hours for the highest priority bugs. We announced this because we believe stability matters. It matters to us because it matters to the people who build on our platform.
In this specific case, the bug with the Realtime API didn't prevent apps from accessing data about likes, posts and comments on pages - those were always queryable via the API on demand. That, along with our understanding that this issue affected only apps subscribed to updates on page content, meant we didn't, on this occasion, classify the bug as within the 48-hour SLA. However, we're constantly listening to our community, and may revisit how we classify and prioritize issues like this going forward.
Every bug matters. The very fact that a developer has reported an issue to us means it's affecting someone. It's on us to respond quickly, gauge how many users and apps are affected, and get to work fixing it.
We apologize for the disruption this issue has caused the affected apps, and are doing everything we can to reduce the chance of this happening again.