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Facebook Goes Down In Apparent Global Outage, People Respond With Hilarious Tweets

By Rahul Srinivas
Published on: 14:30 PST, May 8, 2017

Facebook, one of the world’s most visited websites and the largest social media website is facing a massive global outage as we file this report. According to Downdetector, a website that takes in user generated data to confirm whether or not a web service is down, there has been a huge spike in the number of reports globally about Facebook being down. Several people were also seen commenting in the comments section of the website – confirming the outage. Those who faced the outage were initially presented with a screen that looked like this.

This was confirmed on Twitter by several other users as well.

Some reports said only a few countries were affected.

Needless to say, people had a field day on Twitter and other platforms joking about the outage.

Meanwhile, the site seems to be limping back to normalcy as we file this report with several people now commenting that Facebook is now back up. When we checked, we were able to access the website, but only posts older than 8 hours were visible. This, however, could be a temporary glitch and could be resolved very soon. Comments on DownDetector also confirm that people are now able to access Facebook. However, on Twitter, people are still tweeting with the Facebook Down and #Facebookdown hashtag. Apart from the main Facebook website and app, the company’s popular messaging application Facebook Messenger also remained inaccessible for the entire duration of the outage. While initial reports indicated that the outage only affected countries around Asia and Oceania, several users from the United States were also seen complaining about the issue indicating that the outage was indeed of global nature.

There has been no official word from Facebook so far about the outage and the cause behind it. We do, however, expect the company to come up with a statement soon. It is very unusual for Facebook to go down on a large scale. It has, however, happened in the past. Back in 2010, there was a massive global Facebook outage which lasted for over 2.5 hours. This outage had prompted Facebook to come up with a detailed post explaining what had happened.

Update: More than 12 hours after the outage, Facebook is yet to come out with an official statement that would have told the reasons for the downtime. What was more interesting was the fact that Twitter also faced a similar outage just minutes after we reported about this Facebook outage. However, both the social media websites were back online a few minutes later. Twitter too, has shied away from an official response for the latest outage. This meant people had several theories behind the outage. Industry insiders however believe that this could have been an AWS (Amazon Web Services) related issue as one poster on TechCrunch pointed out.

“Looks like Twitter is down right now (but Facebook seems to be working). Weird! Another Amazon AWS outage perhaps? I don’t see any other services having issues…”

Facebook officials from Australia were a bit forthcoming and when asked about the outage did confirm that it did happen. In an emailed statement, a Facebook spokesperson told News.com.eu that the outage was caused by an “unspecified technical problem’.

“Earlier today, some Facebook users were unable to access Facebook briefly due to a technical issue,” the statement read.

“We have now fixed the issue and apologise for any inconvenience caused,” it further added.

Were you by any chance affected by this Facebook outage earlier today? Do let us know in the comments section below.

[Featured Image By Gerlat/Pixabay]

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