That became apparent this week when service disruptions at the social network rippled throughout the Net, according to APM, a company that tracks website performance across cybespace.

"This outage had an impact across many other sites," Compuware CTO Steve Tack told PCWorld. "It affected sites around the globe."

"What we're seeing here is the impact of how interconnected the Web is," he added. "We're seeing the difference between the old Web, where your outage would only affect your company, and now, where when large services go down, it has a cascading impact on people who integrate with those companies."

For example, the Facebook "like" button is on countless websites on the Net. "That not being available and not performing well caused slowdowns at news and media companies and retail companies and anyone else who takes advantage of that service," Tack explained.

That was evident in data from Compuware's analysis of the Facebook event released Friday. That data showed performance slowdowns at the top 20 news and top 60 retail sites on the Web at the same time Facebook was experiencing service problems.