Facebook "back up to 100 per cent" after half-hour outage
"Something went wrong," a message on the social network told would-be visitors. "We resolved the issue quickly," the company says.
Facebook went down for around half an hour this morning, frustrating would-be users of the social network around the world.
Visitors to the popular site, which boasts 1.28 billion monthly users, were met with a notice that read, "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can."
"Earlier this morning, we experienced an issue that prevented people from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time," a Facebook spokesperson told CNET. "We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100 per cent. We're sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused."
A storm of tweets from around the world bemoaned the outage.
Is facebook not working for anyone else?
- Sam. ✌ (@SamWadsy) June 19, 2014
More Tweets on #Facebook issues from folks in India, US, Israel, Philippines, Switzerland, Germany, Bangladesh, UAE, Mongolia, Norway.
-- Newley Purnell (@newley) June 19, 2014
Facebook, which was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, has grown to be the second most popular site on the Internet, according to ranking firm Alexa, second only to Google.
It's thought that the site went down just before 1am PT, or 9am BST, marking an estimated offline period of roughly half an hour.
Both Facebook itself and social plug-ins that use the site appeared to be broken during the outage. The downtime follows the announcement of Slingshot, a new Facebook mobile app that lets users share ephemeral, self-deleting photos and videos with each other, à la Snapchat.
Editor's note, 10:20am BST: This story was updated with Facebook's official comment.