The New Facebook Pages Are Here [UPDATED]

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Update #2: The push appears to have been accidental. A Facebook spokesperson tells us, “While we are always experimenting with new features internally we are not making changes to Pages right now. Organizations invest a lot of time on their Facebook Pages because millions of people find them useful everyday. We remain committed to providing ways for Page owners to customize and control the experience on their Page. If we do make changes, we will provide partners with advance notice.”

Update: Pages have been reverted back to the old style, and a new tweet from Facebook suggests that the mass transformation may have been unintentional or caused prototype features to get accidentally pushed as well. “Also, some internal prototypes were exposed to people and resulted in us disabling the site briefly. It’s now back to normal,” reads the tweet. We’ve reached out to Facebook for additional clarification.

Facebook ceremoniously launched its new Profile Pages less than two weeks ago. Today, Facebook has gifted Page admins with a similar holiday surprise — a big facelift and feature overall to Pages.

Here’s what’s new: Pages now match Profiles and Place Pages in style and design, there’s a new left-hand menu that has been introduced to replace tab navigation and Facebook Questions have been integrated into the experience.

Facebook has also included a new feature that lets Page admins quickly switch between accounts. The Account menu option in the upper left-hand corner now includes a “Switch Accounts” option, as seen below. Admins can click it to pull up a menu to log in to any of the other Pages they have access to.

Today’s Pages transformation was to be expected, as we initially got wind of the pending changes when the new Profile Pages went live. Still, the unannounced push comes as a bit of a surprise.

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Facebook Goes Down Amid Rollout of New Brand Pages [UPDATED]

Update #3 (5:18 p.m. ET): Facebook is now back up. The company tweeted an apology, explaining that “some internal prototypes were exposed to people and resulted in us disabling the site briefly. It’s now back to normal.” Facebook Pages have also returned to their earlier (old) formats.

Update #2 (4:58 p.m. ET): Facebook appears to be going in and out of service.

Update (4:44 p.m. ET): Facebook appears to be back up for most users.

Facebook just began rolling out several new features, including newly redesigned brand Pages (first revealed about a week and a half ago), a new Photos section dubbed “Memories” that allows users to view photos by year, and the ability to switch accounts for managing different Facebook Pages without having to log out.

However, at around the time the new features began appearing (4:15 ET), the site went down for many users, including all of us here at Mashable. Per usual, hundreds of users have since turned to Twitter to complain about the outage.

We’ve reached out to Facebook to find out the reason for the downtime and will update the post with any additional information. A source close to Facebook said the outage was related to an issue with customized tabs on Facebook Pages, which disappeared an hour before the site went down. In addition, Page owners were unable to determine which tab visitors landed on. When the site reappeared temporarily, customized tabs and landing pages were restored.

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