Earlier this week, several legitimate Facebook (News - Alert) apps were mistakenly disabled by the social networking site’s automated system, which disables malicious applications to protect the platform.

"This normally results in thousands of malicious apps being disabled and improves our automated systems' ability to detect similar attacks in the future," Facebook employee Eugene Zarakhovsky wrote in a blog post.

Tuesday’s mishap began with a broad pattern that correctly matched many thousands of malicious apps, but which also matched many high-quality apps.

"When we detected this error, we immediately stopped the process and began work to restore access," Zarakhovsky wrote. "The process took longer than expected because of the number of apps affected and bugs related to the restoration of app metadata."

Given the nature of Facebook’s business, it’s inevitable that mistakes will happen. The company’s proactive measures, while necessary to protect its users and developers from malicious attacks, unfortunately led to an overabundance of caution that also included denial of service for developers.

While developers may have lost users over the matter, at least Facebook has done right by its public and is taking the proper precautions – the right amount this time – and hopefully its newer algorithms will target only the apps that need attention.

“We will address the bugs and bottlenecks that made the recovery process slower than expected,” wrote Zarakhovsky.

The social networking site experienced a site-wide outage back in June when, upon going to Facebook's website, many users were directed not in the usual sign-in page but to this message instead: "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can."

"Earlier today, an internal issue in our Web infrastructure caused the site to be slow or unavailable for a brief period of time," Facebook said in a statement at the time of the outage. "We resolved the issue quickly, and should now be back to 100 percent. We apologize for any inconvenience."