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Facebook experiences apparent outage

Users trying to visit the social network on the Web are greeted by the message that the page doesn't exist, but smartphone users report being able to access the mobile version.

Steven Musil Night Editor / News
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. He's been hooked on tech since learning BASIC in the late '70s. When not cleaning up after his daughter and son, Steven can be found pedaling around the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining CNET in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers.
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Facebook is currently suffering an apparent disruption that is preventing many of its users from accessing the social network.

Downforeveryoneorjustme.com was giving visitors intermittent "down" answers this evening when they checked on Facebook's status.

While the mobile version of Facebook was available to smartphone and tablet users, people trying to visit the Web version Tuesday evening were greeted by the message that the page did not exist.

The outage appears to have begun around 6 p.m. PT, but it's unknown how many people might be affected.

Facebook users turned to Twitter to complain about the outage:

Facebook has experienced a handful of outages of varying degrees during the past year. In December, the social network suffered a DNS issue that caused some people temporarily being unable to reach the site. And in October, the company inadvertently caused many users across Europe to be knocked off the site after problems with traffic optimization tests.

Update at 8:45 p.m. PT with Facebook statement: "Earlier today, an internal issue in our web infrastructure caused the site to be slow or unavailable for a brief period of time. We resolved the issue quickly, and should now be back to 100 percent. We apologize for any inconvenience." A Facebook representative could not say how widespread the outage was but indicated that it was not limited to North America.