Facebook suffered its biggest outage in the last four years after being inaccessible for roughly 30 minutes worldwide.
Facebook, the world's largest social networking service with over 1.2 billion users worldwide, suffered a massive global outage for roughly 30 minutes. The Facebook outage affected the web homepage, messenger service and mobile apps in Asia, Middle East and Europe. The widespread outage Thursday was deemed as the biggest in the last four years. Twitter was flooded with tweets under the hashtag #facebookdown,where Twitter fans mocked at Facebook users for posting statuses on Twitter.
Facebook was inaccessible to millions of users around the world Thursday morning for about 30 minutes. Users in the US, UK, Israel, Philippines, India and many more countries received an error message that read, "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can." But the brief message was certainly not enough to calm millions of its regular users, who quickly switched to Twitter to post their frustration. In a statement issued to the Guardian, a Facebook spokesperson acknowledged the issue and apologized to its users.
"Earlier this morning, we experienced an issue that prevented people from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time," the statement read. "We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100%. We're sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused."
While the service has been fully restored, the social network failed to explain the cause of the massive disruption. The last major outage Facebook suffered was in 2010 when the site was unavailablefor more than two hours and the social network said a server error caused the systems to corrupt and cause more unattainable damage.
Surprisingly, the social network was down for about 30 minutes during the same time last year. It is not clear if there is any re-occurring glitch causing the problem.
Such outages always bring a swarm of tweets for a good laugh. Some of them are embedded below, but you can always search for #facebookdown for all the tweets on Twitter.